Many people love Facebook business pages because they are an easy to use, cost effectively way of promoting their business. I’ve seen some very unique and creative promotional techniques that businesses have showcased on Facebook business pages, but the overall usefulness of Facebook business page appears to be coming to an ultimate decline.

So what is the reason for this shift away from Facebook business pages?

1. Timeline: Timeline turned out to be a very bad choice for Facebook. Shifting away from being able to openly post on other business pages to having to constantly engage on Timeline is not effective for small business owners. Unless you hire a social media manager most small businesses will not be able to keep up with the 4 to 5 posts a day that Timeline requires plus the extra time necessary to engage with other users so that you will be seen in their Timeline.

2. Default view setting: The default setting to view posts on your profile is set to sort by ‘top stories’. I was recently amazed to discover how many Facebook users are not aware of the default view setting in Facebook. At the top right of your home page there is a pull down menu that always defaults to ‘top stories’ when you log in as apposed to sorting by ‘most recent’ posts.So instead of seeing all of the posts of the companies you have followed, you only see the posts that have the most comments, likes or shares. This is great for large established companies but horrible for the smaller business owner. Unless you have thousands of followers you are not going to get the views you need to increase your engagement, and frankly this just leads to the same stories being shared all over Facebook’s business community.

2. Klout: This one is a big issue for those of us who deal with social media, and as a business owner you should be concerned also. Whether you believe in Klout or dismiss it as the annoying, illogical entity that it is, if you are concerned about credibility you should have a fairly decent Klout score. Why am I mentioning this as a Facebook business page issue? Because Klout doesn’t take your score from your Facebook business page, it pulls in your score from your personal Facebook page. So if you’re a business and you want to add some credibility to your on-line reputation, don’t count on doing it through Klout.

I’ve noticed in the last few days that Facebook business pages are not showing me very many posts from the people that I follow. Interestingly enough there is a noticeable increase in my Google+ business page engagement. Is Facebook experiencing a glitch or is Linkedin finally steam rolling over them as the top business social media network?