Recently, Facebook announced yet another update to its ever-changing News Feed algorithm. It’s been tweaked six times this year alone. Facebook explained that the reason for its latest update is to keep people better connected with friends and family, the foundation of Facebook’s (and other social networking sites’) existence. This means that while scrolling down your Facebook feed, you should be seeing an emphasis on posts from people you actually know, rather than from brand pages or sponsored ads.

Naturally, this shift in priorities is a cause for concern for most companies with brand pages. Their published posts will now be on the bottom of the feed and so have fewer viewers and in turn receive fewer clicks, which is inevitably tied to increased costs for ads and sponsored posts, as well as a decline in page traffic. But it could also be a blessing in disguise.

While posts published directly by brand pages may be destined to plummet to the bottomless depths of your News Feed (we’re talking below the posts from your mom’s aunt’s best friend’s cousin), those shared by third parties will still have a chance to rise up. For example, if one of your Facebook friends shares a post published by a brand page (like this one), that page is more likely to be seen by your network of online friends and Facebook’s whopping 1.65 billion monthly active users.

But what does this mean for brands on Facebook? The importance of dialogue and community engagement is more important now than ever before. So, rather than relying on paid ads to help foster online conversation with users or garner more “likes” per post, doing things as simple as “liking” or “reacting” to a user post, or going the extra mile to have a separate conversation in the comments section becomes even more important to maintaining a follower base. For big name consumer brands such as Coca-Cola, the sting of the change won’t be so apparent. But brand pages associated with nonprofit organizations or smaller companies that cannot afford to increase their ad budget need to look to their followers and Facebook page communities as ambassadors, so that they are more likely to share content with their own networks – or suffer the consequences of death by “unlikes.”

In short, the change  could well force all brands to become better at engaging organically with their online communities , resulting in an experience that is more appealing for Facebook users — a smart move to maintain a competitive edge alongside solo social media platforms like Snapchat.