20 Million Brands Use Facebook Messenger To Talk To Their Customers

Welcome to our Facebook page growth and content engagement study for the month of September 2017.

In these monthly studies, we look at the performance of 5,000 businesses pages to help you understand the growth and engagement standards on the platform.

This helps you understand how your own pages perform and better analyse the results of your efforts.

Reach down but engagement up

The number of page likes grew by 0.1% in the month of September. This is 9% lower than the page growth we saw in August.

Average post published in September reached 7.89% of the page audience. This is 8.57% lower when compared to the previous month and is the lowest post reach since August 2016. Videos reached 9.28% of the audience, photos 7.8%, links 6.79% and plain status updates reached 5.85%.

Average post engagement rate was at 4.96% of people reached. This is a 7.59% increase compared to this August and is the highest engagement rate since July last year. Videos engaged 6.02% of people reached, photos 4.72%, status updates 4.45% and links 4.22%.

16.96% of pages used Facebook advertising in September paying for 37.16% of their total reach.

Messenger up on 1.3 billion monthly active users

Facebook Messenger is now up on 1.3 billion monthly active users. Messenger has now reached WhatsApp in terms of active users. More than 400 million people use Messenger for audio or video calls every month. Messenger Day, the app’s Snapchat Stories clone, has 70 million daily active users now too.

20 million brands use Facebook Messenger to respond to customers

20 million out of 70 million businesses that are on Facebook use Messenger to deal with customer service and respond to their users.

This is a great progress for Messenger as the new home for customer support online.

Head of Messenger David Marcus said:

“I really, really feel that it’s going to be essential for us to be the go-to messaging app when you really want to interact with businesses”.

Ads Manager and Power Editor to become one

Facebook is combining its two advertising tools into one in order to make it easier for businesses to advertise. All the best and most used features will be included in the new tool such as the ability to save and work from drafts which was missing in the previous version of Ads Manager.

It’s now easier to target people based on their offline activities

Facebook is rolling out the ability for advertisers to create custom audiences and target users based on their offline activities such as visits to a brand’s store and other locations, in-store product purchases and calls to the customer support.

There are restrictions in place for which businesses have the ability to use these new features. These include the requirement that the brand must operate at least 10 separate locations.

Facebook restricts the ability to target people by education and employer

After the publication of this article, Facebook has announced that it is temporarily restricting the ability for brands to target advertisements by user’s education, school, field of study, employment and job title.

These user-submitted fields were abused by some people who listed hate speech and other offensive responses within their Facebook profiles. This removal applies only to new advertising campaigns while existing campaigns are not affected.

Facebook is testing a Snooze button

Facebook is testing a new button that makes it possible for users to temporarily unfollow their friends, pages or groups. You basically click on the top right of a post, choose “Unfollow or snooze” and you get the option to snooze someone for a day, a week, a month or to permanently unfollow them.

This could be a good feature for brands as all the extra options mean more control for users but also less chance for someone to permanently unfollow a page. The unfollow permanently options is now hidden behind one extra click.

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