It appears that the verbiage that Facebook uses to tell Page admins how many people have viewed a Fan Page post has changed. The text below a post used to say something along the lines of “Seen by x people.” As you can see in the screenshot below, it now reads “This post was served to X people.”
Why would Facebook change this?
It would seem that the move is a liability play. It is nothing new that many Facebook Fan Page admins are not happy with how far their posts reach, or don’t reach for that matter. Some sources mention that a Pages organic reach is only about 16%. More recent reports say that organic reach could dwindle to as little as 1 – 2%.
Common complaints are that admins work hard to build up a following, even buying ads on Facebook. Even after they’ve established a following the admins have to pay again to promote their posts (to people they’ve already acquired as Fans) if they want to reach more than a fraction of their existing followers.
We can only assume, but our interpretation would be that this acknowledges the reach of posts. This change could be interpreted to mean that the quantity of people that are “served” a post are more like an impression. This is similar to Adwords PPC. Just because an ad via PPC shows up on a page does not mean that a viewer had actually seen the ad. The ad may have loaded, but been below the fold. Thus, no one had actually “seen” it. Facebook’s verbiage seems to acknowledge that just because a post on Facebook had been “shown” does not mean that it was “seen.”
