With more than 1.2 billion active users every single month, Facebook is the staple for many brands to communicate with their customers through social media. Facebook has everything that a brand wants in a communications platform – it’s free for any brand to set up their own page and you don’t have to go out and find your customers and fans, because they’ll come to you. Perfect, right?

Almost. In the last few years Facebook’s timeline has evolved from a timeline of every activity and post that is pushed out from your network to the latest version of Facebook’s News Feed that began its roll out en masse last week. Because of the overwhelming amount of  content that was being thrown at every user, Facebook created something called EdgeRank, an algorithm that scores each story for every user deciding what you should see when you log into Facebook. The biggest losers when EdgeRank first made its appearance were of course the companies whose posts now had to fight for a place in fans’ timelines but Facebook had a solution for these companies, the promoted post.

Now with the click of a button and a single payment to the big blue advertising machine that is Facebook, since it became a listed company in 2012, you too can reach more of your fans with that skilfully crafted, and unique, Harlem Shake video. You see, once Facebook had a cadre of shareholders to report to it had to begin monetising its users and what better way to do that than by forcing the companies that had invested so much time into creating pages to spend money on engagement.

Facebook did this by limiting the amount of organic reach of any post (ie how many fans could see the post without paying) to around 16% in 2012 and then dropped it even further in 2013. A recent study by Social@Ogilvy pegs organic reach for brand pages at just 6% last month and at just over 2% for pages with more than half a million fans. It doesn’t take a white paper and analytics reports from an agency to figure out that Facebook was screwing brands either, this morning a post by American food delivery service Eat24 began doing the rounds on Twitter. The ‘Dear John’ styled letter signalled the impending closure of its 70 000 strong fan page after they grew tired of needing to promote everything to generate any value out of being on Facebook.

Facebook will face a tricky balancing act between monetising and satisfying its shareholders and keeping brands spending money to augment their advertising lest they find more $10 million advertising campaigns being pulled by the likes of General Motors.