Facebook is no longer a place for “promotional posts

Facebook will start dampening traffic on posts like this in 2015, the company says.

Facebook plans to start deprecating newsfeed posts from brand pages that it sees as "too promotional," according to a blog post late Friday.

These types of posts aggravate users more than usual and they'd rather not see them. Ads that brands have to pay to place in newsfeed, however, are apparently fine, according to an evaluation Facebook did with users.

Facebook has long pushed for companies, personalities, and brands to represent themselves with pages and create content to fill users' news feeds. Eventually, enough brands created pages that quantity became a problem, so Facebook began applying an algorithm to curate users' newsfeeds.

This move dampened visibility for many brands and caused some page-owners to speculate that Facebook was trying to nudge them toward paying for promotion. Facebook claimed to be trying to protect its users' delicate attention spans by not crowding their newsfeeds with too many posts. That brands would have to pay money to ensure their posts would reach more users was just an auspicious side effect.

Now, Facebook is formalizing its stance: no one likes promotional posts in their newsfeeds. The blog post states:

[T]here are some consistent traits that make organic posts feel too promotional:

1. Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app

2. Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context

3. Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads

"Beginning in January 2015, people will see less of this type of content in their News Feeds," Facebook continues. "All of this means that Pages that post promotional creative should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time."

Enlarge / Some of the settings a user can play with to control the ads they see.

With this most recent update, brands that created pages specifically as a free place to promote themselves on Facebook won't be able to use the feature anymore. According to Facebook's study, which observed the behavior and preferences of half a million Facebook users, a promotional post is just too unpalatable.

But take heart, brands.

"What we discovered is that a lot of the content people see as too promotional is posts from Pages they like, rather than ads," says the post. Facebook users are cool with ads, the company says, because there are "controls" for the number and quality of ads a user sees. Hence, the content that would not be okay as an overly promotional post will be fine as an paid advertisement from a brand.

"This change will not increase the number of ads people see in their News Feeds," Facebook reassures the users.