Brands and their agents continue to produce a flood of complaints about the declining number of posts that make it into the Facebook news feeds of people who have liked their pages. Blackmail!, they howl, arguing that the change to the algorithm that determines which posts make it into news feeds is designed to force brands to pay actual money for Facebook ads. The social network is out to hurt brands, they whimper. It’s just rotten, they lament.

It’s like email spammers getting outraged over efforts to reduce the amount of spam that shows up in in boxes. Facebook argues that the change was made to ensure that users see relevant posts that generate a lot of engagement instead of the usual promotional crap for which most brands use their Facebook pages.

IBM recently released a study that found only 71% use it to promote events and marketing campaigns, while significantly fewer sought to provide customer support (46%) or interact with customers (39%). Getting a brand post into the news feed happens when the people who have liked the page engage with the post: commenting on it, sharing it, viewing photos and videos, and liking it.

Could it be that brands that stop polluting their pages with the same promotional and marketing garbage through which people fast-forward on their DVRs and start producing solid content people want to see might regain their visibility in news feeds?

It also seems that the same people wringing their hands over Facebook’s algorithm adjustment and decrying the pressure to add paid advertising to the mix are the same ones writing and speaking about how deeply they understand the convergence of earned, owned, paid, and social media. Content strategies require that these previously silo’d disciplines work together in lockstep. Coordination is key. Even the outside agencies that formerly worked only with their specific departments now must collaborate.

Except, it seems, when it comes to Facebook, where the whiners insist that the free ride continue.

Rather than grousing about what no longer works (organic posts in news feeds has dropped about 35%, according to most reports) and take advantage of what does work. For example, people who do see your posts tend to interact with them more—engagement with organic posts from brand pages is actually rising, from from .76% before Facebook tweaked the algorithm to 1.49% in the weeks since. That means (according to AdAge) that “those who do (see your posts) are more likely to have a real affinity for the brand, as opposed to users who may have clicked on the ‘like’ button to enter a contest.”

(Incidentally, Facebook claims posts are showing up at the same 16% level that has been common for some time. If true, that means the brands that create truly engaging posts are getting more visibility while those producing dreck are getting less. That troubles me not at all.)

People click a brand page “like” button for a host of reasons. I’d bet real money the percentage of those who like a page because they consciously want to get the brand’s posts in their news feeds is lower than most marketers think. Consider the broad range of dubious tactics employed by companies to get that like. (Remember when the New Yorker required a like if you wanted to read an article by a popular author?) The simple fact is that 90% of people who like a page never come back.

If you want your posts to get into your followers’ news feeds, you’ll have to earn it. According to Facebook Product Manager Will Cathcart, the News Feed posts that show up depend on how much the user has interacted with the brand in the past, how other people reacted to a specific post, the user’s interaction with similar posts in the past, and if the post received complaints from other people who have seen it (or if the page on which the post appeared has been the subject of a lot of complaints). That importance of that last factor rose with the September algorithm change.

Pepsi is one brand that isn’t crying foul over the change. That’s because Pepsi invests in making sure its page is routinely populated with timely, photo-based posts the brand’s fans want to see and share. In fact, Pepsi has aligned itself with Moment Studio’s Deep Focus service, a “creative newsroom” for Facebook content that features a daily editorial meetings in which production teams look at what’s happening right now in popular culture, then develop posts linked to those memes. The result: substantially higher levels of engagement and, by extension, greater visibility in news feeds. All without paid advertising.

(Disclosure: PepsiCo is a client of Holtz Communication + Technology for internal communications work.)

As for my own feed, the Los Angeles Dodgers page routinely produces organic posts that find their way there. (Today it was the congratulatory post featuring a photo of Mike Piazza—appearing on his first-ever Hall of Fame ballot—at bat. It had generated more than 4,500 likes, 168 comments and 275 shares. That’ll get it done.)

For those brands unwilling to put in the effort, paid advertising is not an unreasonable option. if convergence is reality of the modern content ecosystem, is it fair to call Facebook’s algorithm changes blackmail when it really is just evolution?

Besides, Facebook has introduced a news feed dedicated to the pages people have liked. I check mine at least daily. If the content is good enough, more nad more people will make the Pages Feed a stop, along with their groups and apps.

Brands are, of course, free to leave Facebook and put their resources elsewhere, as Mark Cuban has threatened. The Dallas Mavericks basketball team he owns will move to Tumblr and the new MySpace, he said. And he’s welcome to do that. Whether MySpace (which plans to focus on music) and Tumblr (which is probably unknown to most of Facebook’s 1 billion active account holders) will produce the same kind of returns remains to be seen.

In the meantime, too many brands have a Facebook presence with no supporting strategy. I spoke with a senior VP of communications at an organization that just shut down its Facebook presence not because of reduced news feed visibility but because he determined there was no earthly reason to invest time and effort on a platform that doesn’t advance its agenda. The initial development of a Facebook page was spurred by the “we gotta have a Facebook page” mentality.

But getting spammy posts into news feeds isn’t an entitlement. Marketers need to stop acting like it is and just do their jobs.