Facebook Continues To Crush It But Ads Are 24% More Expensive Than Last Year

This is our Facebook page likes growth and post engagement study for the month of July 2017.

In these studies, we look at the performance of 5,000 Facebook pages to help you understand what the audience growth and content engagement standards are on the platform.

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

Page likes growth and post engagement numbers for July 2017

Page likes growth in July was at 0.08%. This is the new all-time low in the period since we started doing our studies. The previous low was 0.1% in April this year.

Average post reach was at 9.87% of the total audience. Reach has now decreased by 20% since the high point of 12.37% that we saw in February this year.

Videos still continue to dominate the post formats and the average video reached 10.75% of the audience in July. Photos reached 10.4%, links 7.34% and status updates only 6%.

The average engagement rate was at 4.55% of the people reached. Videos engaged 5.02%, photos 4.41%, status updates 4.31% and links 4.16%.

15.12% of pages used Facebook Advertising paying for 35.02% of their total reach.

Facebook announced their financial results for the second quarter of 2017 during last month and there were worrisome news for all the advertisers. Let’s take a look at all the announced numbers.

Facebook is still crushing it

Facebook is still getting great results and continues to be one of the fastest growing and most profitable companies.

Revenue growth in second quarter of 2017 was 45% year over year. Facebook now has 2.006 billion monthly active users which is a 3% growth compared to the previous quarter. 1.32 billion daily active users is a 17% year over year increase.

Profits reached $3.894 billion in the second quarter which is 71% up year over year. Mobile now accounts for 87% of the revenue compared to 84% last year.

5 million advertisers but the average cost is rising

There are now 5 million advertisers on the platform. The number of ads shown to the users grew by 19%.

There is one stat that should worry all the advertisers. Facebook ads have seen a 24% increase in the average cost in the second quarter of this year compared to the second quarter of 2016.

Facebook Messenger advertising is up next

How long can Facebook keep growing like this?

Considering that they are about to slowly start experimenting with advertisements in Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, there is still a long way to go. Mark Zuckerberg has told the analysts that he wants to “move a little faster” with advertising in Messenger and WhatsApp.

The company has announced the plan to extend its home screen advertising in Messenger worldwide in upcoming weeks:

“Ads in the Home tab will follow an auction-based model and will feature the same sort of user-targeting capabilities found on Facebook or Instagram, Chudnovsky said. “We’ll start slow,” he said. “When the average user can be sure to see them we truly don’t know because we’re just going to be very data-driven and user feedback-driven on making that decision.”

Paid subscriptions on Instant Articles

Another potential revenue source that the company is about to start experimenting with is the ability for Facebook users to become paid subscribers to the different media publications’ Instant Articles on Facebook.

Facebook has launched the Instant Articles analytics tool to show the differences of publishing your content using Instant Articles versus linking to the mobile version of your own website.

“Facebook says that, on average, here’s how much more people click and read Instant Articles over mobile web in different parts of the world:

U.S. and Canada click and read over 25 percent more
Europe clicks and reads over 30 percent more
Middle East and North Africa click and read 80 percent more
Southeast Asia reads and clicks 60 percent more
Latin America reads and clicks 60 percent more
India reads and clicks over 75 percent more”

Facebook Pages can now start their own Facebook groups

Facebook Groups are continuing to become an even more established part of the Facebook community experience. Now even Facebook Pages can create and connect to Facebook Groups.

According to Chris Cox: “We’re making Groups for Pages available around the world today. If you are an artist, a business, a brand, or a newspaper, you can now create fan clubs and groups centered around your super-fans. There are over 70M Pages on Facebook so we hope this unlocks a lot of goodness.”

The company has also made it simple for pages to highlight any communities that they have created. And you can also link an existing group on top of launching a new group.

Interested in Facebook Groups? Take a look at our guide here.