Recently, the social media and software companies BuzzSumo and Buffer analyzed more than 43 million posts from the top 20,000 brands’ (by engagement) Facebook business pages. Their goal was to determine the state of Facebook business pages in 2018. The findings don’t seem that great unless you spend all day posting items to your page. Here are five findings from the survey. (More information at BufferApp.com)


#1 | The top 20,000 Facebook pages increased their pace of posting

Let’s start with some positive-sounding news. In the second quarter of 2018, the top 20,000 Facebook business pages (by engagement: shares, likes, reactions, and comments) increased their posts to a little more than four per day. (See below.)

        135 | The average posts per month of most active Facebook business pages
            4 |  The average posts per day of the most active Facebook business pages
       24% | This cohort’s percentage increase in posts per quarter over the previous quarter
 90,032 | Number of posts per day by the 20,000 most active Facebook business pages

Source: BuzzSumo and Buffer

#2 | Overall engagement-per-post continues to decline

While the top 20,000 users of business pages have seen improvement in engagement, the same can’t be said when analyzing the overall engagement per-post metric of all business pages. Overall, business page engagement has plummeted.

-50% | The percentage drop during the past 18 months in Facebook business page engagement (shares, likes, reactions, and comments).

Source: BuzzSumo and Buffer

#3 | Facebook engagement down for video, images, and links

The survey also revealed that there is a difference in performance among the types of content that are posted (links, videos, images).  Counter to conventional wisdom, the survey found that images (not video) regularly receive the most engagement.

9,370 | Engagements per post from Jan.-Mar. 2017
3,454 | Engagements per post from Jan.-Mar. 2018

 

Source: BuzzSumo and Buffer

#4 | Five posts per day resulted in the highest overall engagement

Those who posted on their Facebook Business page five times per day received an average of 2,466 engagements per post (a total of 12,330). The reason seems obvious: The more seeds you plant, the better chance you have of finding what types of posts blossom for your users.

#5 | Artists’ page engagement decreased in engagement by 70%

No obvious reason for this beyond the challenge we all face: Our time is a fixed commodity. As posts become more and more available, users still have the same amount of more time in the day so we solve that challenge by devoting less time per engagement.

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