Facebook has encouraged brands for years to invest significantly in media buys and build their community under the pretence of being able to engage with them often and for free. But that is no longer the case since last year as they introduced their promoted post feature.

Pouring insult to injury, Facebook announced today that starting 2015, they will start punishing business Pages that uses words like “BUY THIS!” “INSTALL NOW!’ “CONTEST!” in the News Feed by showing them to a lot fewer of their fans, even if the Page paid for ads to get those fans.

While Facebook’s latest bait and switch is not new, this development presents new challenges for ecommerce shops as sharing product links on Facebook posts is usually the easiest way for merchants to showcase their products and to keep their news feed fresh.

It seems that if merchants want to maximise customer reach on Facebook and to drive traffic to their product pages, merchants will now have to publish interesting non-product content like product reviews or event happenings and then link their products to these pages.

Users of Linkcious will easily be able to do just that; automatically embed the shop products within their blog content to maximise relevant referral traffic to their shop. Merchants will not have to decide which products to show on their content, we use Artificial Intelligence to help you decide.

If you are a merchant, start using Linkcious for free today.