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It recently made tweaks to its algorithm that push updates from Facebook Pages—the presences maintained by organizations and businesses—lower in the news feed and show fewer posts to users.

Facebook says the best way to ensure a broad audience is viewing your posts is to buy advertisements. Pages can buy ads by reach, and advertisers can target specific demographics to view posts.

As Facebook continues to put an emphasis on more “high quality” content and lowers organic reach, it could force businesses, small mom-and-pop shops and big brands alike, to rethink their marketing strategies. 

It is one thing to ask a business to pay to increase its visibility, that is the type of thing that businesses budget for. It is another to ask users on their personal pages directly for money. Google has never asked me to spend money to improve the search results for my own name, for instance.

A talented team can give you a richer, more robust presence than you could ever achieve on your own.

Help them build social capital. Practitioners of this new, community-oriented marketing are also rethinking their customer value proposition for such MVP (or "Customer Champion" or "Rockstar") customer advocates and influencers. Traditional marketing often tries to encourage customer advocacy with cash rewards, discounts or other untoward inducements. The new marketing helps its advocates and influencers create social capital: it helps them build their affiliation networks, increase their reputation and gives them access to new knowledge — all of which your customer influencers crave.

Get your customer advocates involved in the solution you provide

Florida won half of the "non-buyers" of its anti-teen-smoking "product" away from its much bigger, much better funded competitor. They did so by tapping the best source of buyer motivation: peer influence.

Others attacked the allegedly pernicious influence of high-frequency trading algorithms that comb news and execute trades in nanoseconds.

algorithms that engage in high-frequency trading, or HFT: "It's not the fact that @AP was just hacked," he tweeted. "It's the fact that we have HFT algos reading headlines reacting to them."

customer support and product management reported infrequent use of social media to contact customers (3.1% and 2.9%, respectively).

Twitter is overwhelmingly the most popular social media site accessed at work for both personal and professional use at 70%, followed by Facebook at 65% and LinkedIn at 51%.

Corporate intranets and other internally built systems came in a distant fourth at 19%.

Businesses have recognized that resistance is futile. The survey found there was no difference between light and heavy use at companies with monitored, blocked or restricted sites.

“Employees will use social media during the workday,” said Flip Filipowski, CEO, SilkRoad Technology. “These findings make it clear: Companies can either find ways to use social media to achieve measureable business results, or they can ignore it at their own peril. There is a common misperception that people only use social media for personal reasons. This research proves that people are looking to social media to help them be better at their jobs — including connecting with co-workers and customers.”

Niche players often manage to initially attract a devoted audience, only to lose them later to a larger competitor that moves into the market. That's because the community usually moves to where there are more people. And Facebook has 800 million people.

Humans, like the mice in Skinner’s box, crave predictability and struggle to find patterns, even when none exist. Variability is the brain’s cognitive nemesis and our minds make deduction of cause and effect a priority over other functions like self-control and moderation.

Recent neuroscience has revealed that our dopamine system works not to provide us with rewards for our efforts, but to keep us searching by inducing a semi-stressful response we call desire.

Email, for example, is addictive because it provides all three reward types at random intervals. First, we have a social obligation to answer our emails (the tribe). We are also conditioned to know that an email may tell us information about a potential business opportunity (the hunt). And finally, our email seems to call for us to complete the task of removing the unopened item notification in a sort of challenge to gain control over it (the self). Interestingly, these motivations go away as soon as we’ve actually opened all our emails and the mystery disappears. We’re addicted to checking email while there is still variability of reward and once that’s gone, emails languish in our inboxes.

We’re meant to be part of a tribe so our brains seek out rewards that make us feel accepted, important, attractive, and included.

But as sociable as we are, our individual need for sustenance is even more crucial. The need to acquire physical things, such as food and supplies, is part of the brain’s operating system and we clearly wouldn’t have survived the millennia without this impulse. But where we once hunted for food, today we hunt for deals and information. The same compulsion that kept us searching for food coerces us to open emails from Groupon and Appsumo. New shopping startups make the hunt for products entertaining by introducing variability to what the user may find next. Pinterest and Wanelo keep users searching with an endless supply of eye candy, a trove of dopamine flooding desirables. To see an example of how the hunt for information engages users, look no further then the right side of this page. There, you will find a listing of popular posts. Using intriguing images and short, attention-grabbing text, the list is a variable reward mechanism designed to keep you hunting for your next discovery.

We also seek mastery of the world around us. Game mechanics, found everywhere from Zynga games to business productivity apps like to-do lists, provide a variable rewards system built around our need to control, dominate, and complete challenges. Slaying new messages in your inbox stimulates neurons similar to those stimulated by playing StarCraft.

Variable rewards come in three types and involve the persistent pursuit of: rewards of the tribe, rewards of the hunt, and rewards of the self.

As B.F. Skinner discovered over 50 years ago, variable rewards are a powerful inducement to creating compulsions.

Nine out of ten smartphone searches results in an action (purchasing, visiting a business, etc.) 24% recommended a brand or product to others as a result of a smartphone search

Local Information Seekers: Looking for local information is done by virtually all smartphone users and consumers are ready to act on the information they find. 95% of smartphone users have looked for local information 88% of these users take action within a day, indicating these are immediate information needs 77% have contacted a business, with 61% calling and 59% visiting the local business

Purchase-driven Shoppers: Smartphones have become an indispensable shopping tool and are used across channels and throughout the research and decision-making process. 79% of smartphone consumers use their phones to help with shopping, from comparing prices, finding more product info to locating a retailer 74% of smartphone shoppers make a purchase, whether online, in-store, or on their phones 70% use their smartphones while in the store, reflecting varied purchase paths that often begin online or on their phones and brings consumers to the store

Reaching Mobile Consumers: Cross-media exposure influences smartphone user behavior and a majority notice mobile ads which leads to taking action on it.71% search on their phones because of an ad exposure, whether from traditional media (68%) to online ads (18%) to mobile ads (27%) 82% notice mobile ads, especially mobile display ads and a third notice mobile search ads Half of those who see a mobile ad take action, with 35% visiting a website and 49% making a purchase

Make sure you can be found via mobile search as consumers regularly use their phones to find and act on information. Incorporate location based products and services and make it easy for mobile customers to reach you because local information seeking is common among smartphone users.  Develop a comprehensive cross-channel strategy as mobile shoppers use their phones in-store, online and via mobile website and apps to research and make purchase decisions.  Last, implement an integrated marketing strategy with mobile advertising that takes advantage of the knowledge that people are using their smartphones while consuming other media and are influenced by it.