Facebook Page Engagement Rate Hits Record Low In October

Welcome to our Facebook Page growth and engagement study for the month of October.

We analyse the results of 5,000 brand pages to see what the growth and engagement standards are on the platform.

This helps you benchmark your own results and figure out where you stand.

Take a free Locowise trial and compare your own pages against pages in our study.

A future without page likes?

Facebook Pages are visited by more than one billion people per month, but this doesn’t really result in many page likes.

Average fan growth in October was at 0.16% of the page audience. This is still 23.08% higher than in September which saw the record low page likes growth.

Fan growth is low and page likes don’t matter that much anymore. Facebook is even testing a page layout that doesn’t display the number of page likes.

The average post reach in October was at 9.75% of the total audience. This is a 8.7% increase compared to September.

A photo post reached 11.08% of the audience, a video reached 9.45%, link reached 6.22%, and status update 4.23%.

The average post engagement rate in October was at 4.37% of the people reached. This is 2.24% lower than in September and is the lowest engagement rate we’ve seen since we started doing our studies in May 2015.

Videos engaged the most with 5.54%, status engaged 4.51%, links 4.45% and photos were the least engaging format with 4.16%.

Page likes growth is low, reach is low, engagement is at the lowest since we started doing our studies… what can page owners do to get better results? All organic opportunities may be low, but Facebook advertising is there and is the simplest option if you want fast results. 15.33% of pages we looked at used Facebook advertising during the month to boost their content, paying for 29.38% of their total reach.

Another growth hack that might work for you is branded content or influencer marketing. Basically, you get influential people and pages to share your content and help you get a wider reach. In some cases, this is a more effective strategy than Facebook ads, and it’s now one of the most popular tactics for growing a page on Facebook and getting clicks to a website.

Anything else that you can do? Optimise everything. Squeeze every last drop of organic juice that you can get from Facebook. Optimise what content you post, which formats you use, what day and time of the day that you post it.

Deep analysis of your audience, your current performance, the content you have posted in recent weeks, and the activities of your competitors can help you gain an organic boost in your results. Locowise can help you do this.

Financial results for the third quarter of 2016 have been released. Facebook grew 4.67% in the quarter, reaching 1.79 billion monthly active users. Just over a billion of these are using Facebook on mobile devices only. 1.18 billion users are active every day, which is 66% of all monthly users.

The revenue in Q3 was at $7.01 billion, and the profit was at $2.379 billion (160% increase year over year). Mobile makes 84% of Facebook’s ad revenue or $5.7 billion in Q3 which is higher than the total revenue Facebook had in Q3 of 2015.

Interestingly enough, Facebook’s effort to block adblockers resulted in an increase of 18% in desktop revenue.

What’s Mark Zuckerberg’s comment on all this? “We had another good quarter.”

So is there anything negative on the horizon for Facebook? They’re approaching the maximum ad load per user in the news feed. They should reach that point by mid-2017.

This means that they won’t be able to increase the number of ads they show in the news feed, unless they decide to start showing more ads than organic content. And this might not be the best way to please the users and keep them happily engaged.

The easiest way to get around this problem is to start pushing advertisements to other areas. They’ve been doing that with Instagram ads (which still has space to grow), ads in the Audience Network on other websites, advertising in Facebook messenger (probably also WhatsApp soon enough), more video advertising, new ad options within Instant Articles, and now also ads in Facebook Groups.

There hardly goes a month without significant improvements to the video experience on the platform. Art themed video filters are coming soon. 360 videos and photos are now more easily integrated into galleries with regular pictures and videos. You can even include them in your Instant Articles.

According to Zuckerberg: “People are creating and sharing more video, and we think it’s pretty clear that video is only going to become more important. So that’s why we’re prioritizing putting video first across our family of apps, and taking steps to make it even easier for people to express themselves in richer ways.”

Verified pages can now schedule their live streams in order to let their audience know in advance and build buzz around broadcasts. The scheduled stream gets announced in the news feed and people can opt-in to get a reminder just before your broadcast starts. Viewers then join a waiting room where they can chat with each other for up to three minutes before the broadcast goes live. This feature will be rolled out to all pages in upcoming weeks.

Facebook has now enhanced the call-to-action button on pages to “allow people to schedule, order, buy and do more seamlessly on your Page. Businesses can choose to add the new call-to-action buttons to their Pages and provide customers with a simple form that’s easy to complete in just a few taps.”

Developers can now apply to build even more services to provide a richer experience on Facebook pages. The actions that are currently available are:

Start Order – restaurant order processing with delivery.com or Slice.
Book Now – appointment booking with Booker, BookingBug, Front Desk, HomeAdvisor, Microsoft Bookings, MyTime, Pingup, Schedulicity, Setster and Simplybook.me.
Get Quote – request a quote for your service via Porch or TalkLocal.
Buy Tickets – selling event tickets with EventBrite and Ticketmaster.
See Showtimes – providing show schedules and selling movie tickets with Fandango.