I work in marketing, so I know the algorithm is frustrating from both sides. Pages don’t like that their carefully crafted post reaches a fraction of the people who actively chose to follow them, and followers don’t like it either — “I never see anything from your page” is one of the most common complaints I’ve heard in my job.
So when Facebook introduced the @everyone tag as a way for page admins to push a notification to their followers, the appeal was obvious — a workaround, a way to cut through. Used sparingly, it’s fine (and I can see many occasions when I’d be advocating to use it!).
The problem is that two of the pages I follow have decided every single post warrants a notification, and the predictable result is that they irritate me, because nothing is prioritised. I’m forced to consume the content to know if I want to consume the content. And it isn’t all the page admin’s fault — the notification itself reads “[Page] mentioned you and other followers in a comment”, with no preview, no post title, nothing to indicate whether the thing being flagged is actually worth tapping through to.
Even Facebook quietly advises caution; as Clicksmith point out, overusing @everyone reduces engagement and trains followers to ignore you — or worse, unfollow.
I genuinely want to hear from these two pages. I followed them on purpose. But every time my phone buzzes with another contextless mention, I’m a bit closer to muting them entirely.
