Facebook is a huge community with various ways to keep up with your friends, people of same interests or even with institutions or celebrities. The last part especially is done through Pages where you can keep up with your favourite publication posts or celebrity posts.
Facebook does this thing where they change their News Feed algorithms to prioritize certain content over others. They changed it earlier this year where they would prioritize your friends’ posts before content from Pages. We are now seeing the effects of this move by Facebook thanks to a report.
Buffer in partnership with BuzzSumo analyzed more than 43 million posts from the top 20,000 brands on Facebook and they found some key findings.
Facebook engagement for videos images and links went down and overall Page engagement is declining, which was the expected outcome from the new algorithms.
They fond that engagement has dropped by more than 50% over the last 18 months from their sample. Even more sad is the average engagement per post, which has dropped by 65%, which is massive by any measure.
However, it seems like brands have found a way around this problem. Apparently posting 5 times a day received an average of 2466 engagements per post and 1202 engagements per post when the Pages in review posted 10 times a day. Posting once every day led to an average of 3127 engagements per post. This meant that posting 5 times per day appears to be the optimal frequency as to which brands get the best of both worlds.
Facebook’s new algorithm is touted as among the reasons for the declines experienced by Pages and it is now up to admins to know how to better manage their pages to maintain their engagement numbers.
In simple terms, Facebook wants page owners to advertise.