One of the social media tool platform – Buffer did an analysis of 43 million Facebook Page posts. The company examined posts from the top 20,000 brands on Facebook, to determine where things stand in terms of Page engagement and what might be causing it to fall.

In January, Facebook updated its News Feed algorithm to prioritize content from friends and family over that from Pages, causing the reach of the business pages to drop.

Page Engagement Continues to Decline

Buffer found that, over the past 18 months, Page engagement has dropped by more than 50%.

The numbers don’t look great for individual page posts, either as Buffer found that the average engagement there fell nearly two-thirds from 4,490 engagements per post, to 1,582.

Images are getting the highest engagements Despite Facebook’s encouragement to invest in more video, particularly live video, when it first announced its January algorithm change, the study found that images are the highest-engaged content type from Pages.

Facebook announced the launch of several new video tools, such as Watch and IGTV, which may have been foretold by its urging businesses to focus on live video — which, at the time, it said received 6X the engagement as non-live ones.

However as per above chart, the average engagement per image post fell from 9,370 in Q1 2017, to 3,454 in Q2 2018: a drop of over 63%.

Over the past year, the number of posts per quarter from the Pages analyzed has jumped from 6.5 million to 8.1 million: an increase of 24%.

As Buffer notes, there’s long been a quantity vs. quality debate among social media marketers, with the question remaining: Does posting a greater volume result in more engagement?

Pages that posted less than once each day experienced the highest per-post engagement.

But there’s a catch: The Pages that posted at this rate also received the lowest amount engagement overall. So, while the per-post metrics showed promise, general Page engagement looked different.

Finally, the study ranked 10 Page types to determine which category suffered the highest drop engagement. The hardest hit, it found, were artist Pages — which saw their average engagement fall by 70.6%.

The category experiencing the softest blow was retail brand, which saw a drop just shy of 50% — the overall average fall in Page engagement during the study’s time range.

What needs to done?

• Create highly engaging & shareable content.

• Make sure you are able to engage audience within 10 minutes of your post time.

• ‘Commenting’ still have the highest edge weight. Ask your audience to comment on your feeds.