Facebook Pages Use Advertising To Pay For 32% Of Their Total Reach

Welcome to our Facebook growth and engagement study for the month of April. Here’s what we found out.

1.65 billion people used Facebook every month in the first three months of 2016. 1.09 billion of them used the platform daily. That’s a 16% increase compared to 2015.

Facebook made $5.38 billion in revenue and $1.51 billion in net income in the first quarter of the year. It’s a 52% increase in income compared to the first quarter of 2015. 82% of the advertising revenue now comes from the mobile phones.

50% more advertisements were served in 2016 than in 2015, and advertisers are now paying 5% more than what they used to last year per ad. Facebook has made 33% more money per user this year than they did last year.

Facebook Messenger has 900 million monthly active users while Instagram has 400 million. Users spend 50 minutes per day between these three platforms. That’s even without counting WhatsApp usage.

Page likes growth in April was at 0.18% of the total audience. This is the exact same growth that we’ve seen last month. March and April of 2016 have seen the highest page likes growth since November 2015.

43.28% of pages we looked at used Facebook advertising during the month of April. They paid for 31.68% of their total reach. This is the highest paid reach proportion we’ve seen since we started doing our studies in May 2015. It’s also the highest number of Facebook pages using ads since October 2015.

Average post reach in April was at 10.71% of the total audience. This is a 6.13% decrease compared to March. Despite the decrease, organic post reach has seen a resurgence in the year 2016. Months with the highest reach since we started doing our studies in May 2015 are the first four months of this year.

Facebook has announced a news feed algorithm change that could impact your reach. They are reducing how often people see several posts in a row from the same source. This could impact pages that have a high posting frequency.

Posting frequency is one of the main things you need to consider when creating your Facebook content schedule. What is the ideal number of posts you should publish in order to optimise your reach and engagement? The answer is in the data and Locowise now does the calculation for you. Take a look at our brand new Locowise 3.0 data scientist report for your optimal posting frequency.

Videos were the top performing content format in April reaching 12.17% of the total audience. This is consistent with what we’ve seen over the last many months. Facebook’s algorithm prefers video format and awards video publishers with extra reach. Photos reached 11.53% of the audience, links reached 9.32% and plain status updates only reached 5.09%.

Facebook is working on introducing commercial messages within the live streams. They are also considering a feature that allows viewers to tip money to the video creator. And now you can finally turn off the notifications about the live streams.

One interesting tactic some companies are trying is to “live” stream pre-recorded videos on Facebook Live. This can be done through the Live API. Facebook is all-in on live video at the moment. It’s a great way for companies to use that to their advantage and get attention to some of their existing video content.

Facebook has a mountain to climb in order to get more people to live stream their lives. A poll by The Huffington Post and YouGov showed that 77% of Facebook users they surveyed would never use live streams to broadcast events from their lives. 37% of these said that they hardly ever post any personal information on the platform while 59% haven’t heard about the live streaming feature.

Engagement in April was at 5.04% of the people reached. This is a 2.44% increase compared to March. Engagement on the platform has increased by 13.26% since the lowest point in January 2016. Let’s hope that engagement keeps growing.

Facebook is definitely doing their best in order to keep the audience engaged on the platform. This month we saw the first temporary reaction on the platform. Facebook added a flower button for Mother’s Day. We can expect more of the temporary reactions to follow for some of the other big events and holidays.

Facebook has recognised that actions such as sharing and commenting may not necessarily be the best indicators to what content people want to consume. The news feed algorithm now predicts how likely you are to click on an article and how long you are likely to spend reading it. All this in order to put more relevant content into your news feed.

They have also begun surveying users on their motivation for sharing content about their personal lives and about their activity on other platforms.

There was a surprising development in terms of content format engagement in April. Plain status updates were the most engaging format. 5.40% of the people reached engaged with a status update. Videos and photos both engaged 5.26% of the people reached. Links engaged 4.11%.

You’re still best off by posting videos, though. 0.64% of your total audience will engage with a video post on average, 0.61% will engage with a photo, 0.38% with a link thumbnail, and only 0.27% with a status update.

We have entered the messaging app era. Top 4 messaging apps (Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat and Viber) now have just as many active users as top 4 social networks (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter). 2.1 billion monthly active users on each side.

And the messenger bots are here. More than 10,000 developers are already building bots for Facebook Messenger. Many of the reviews say that most of the current bots suck, but one of the early successes is Activision’s Call of Duty bot. It exchanged more than 6 million messages with its users in the first week of existence. Facebook is working to add chatbot analytics and they should be available soon.

It will be interesting to see how the increasing number of bots will affect the engagement on Messenger platform. Messenger has been growing very rapidly over the last year, but the bots could bring spam onto the platform and dehumanise it. The experience from China’s WeChat says that it shouldn’t happen but let’s wait and see how Facebook approaches the potential spam problem.

The question right now is which brand will create the first major bot success that helps people and drives engagement in an amazing way?

● Benchmark your own page to pages in this study. Use our Facebook Page Analyser to measure your performance against 5,000 other Facebook pages and see how well your page is doing.

● Start using live streaming and post more video. Facebook is all about streaming and video these days. You are leaving a lot of free organic reach behind by not taking advantage of video.

● Reconsider your posting frequency. Facebook has made an update to its algorithm to reduce the number of posts users see from the same source. You should figure out your optimal posting frequency to optimise the number of people you reach and engage. Get a free Locowise trial. We crunch the data for you, show you your optimal posting frequency, and which days of the week and times of the day you should post for highest engagement.

● Consider creating a Facebook Messenger bot for your brand. It’s a brand new platform and a brand new opportunity for brands to get ahead. The platform has 900 million monthly unique users, but your company can be one of the first in your field to succeed on the platform with a bot.