Without a doubt, Facebook still reigns in the social media industry. With a massive amount of users and brands, information flows faster than most people can follow.
While Facebook has an increasing number of monthly users, the average number of engagements with Facebook posts created by brands and publishers has fallen by over 20 percent since January 2017.
Buzzsumo has analyzed more than 880 million Facebook posts that were published by brands and publishers in 2016, and from the sample, it concluded that the average number of engagements has fell from 340 to 264 over the course of the first six months of the year.
Over the year there was a decline in the number of image and link posts published and a 10 percent increase in video posts.
This is to be expected given Facebook’s focus on video and the higher engagement which this format generates.
However, video posts still only represented just over 10 percent of all posts during the year.
The Reason For The Decline
Facebook has been pushing videos a lot more than ever before.
According to the survey that includes engagements on all posts, including paid promotions, there are also a number of other explanations for this declining level of engagement.
While brands and publishers may have spent more on promotions over the year, the decreasing exposure and engagement was because Facebook's organic reach has declined significantly and increases in paid promotion have not enabled brands and publishers to maintain their levels of Facebook engagement.
Facebook itself acknowledges that organic reach is declining. They say this is for two main reasons:
The first is more content. Facebook has average of 1,500 stories that could appear in user's News Feed. So here, competition in high and increasingly difficult. The second is the changes in Facebook's algorithms. The algorithms are the ones that decide what contents to show, and there are thousands of factors that contribute to a post's visibility.
Facebook has also demote lower quality content and clickbait headlines that withhold information from the reader.