During the past 6 months I have noticed a sharp drop in engagement with Facebook for the business pages I monitor which span a variety of sectors from insurance to employment to travel. This might be because a while back Facebook changed what is shown in users feeds or it might be due to less people using Facebook or a combination of both.
I wrote this article because the other day I saw this post about Why Copyblogger is Killing Its Facebook page (http://www.copyblogger.com/bye-facebook/) and it made me wonder if there is enough value in having a Facebook page for many businesses.
Let’s face it the glory days of Facebook seem to in the past with users moving to new social media networks and others leaving Facebook through disenchantment or lack of usage.
Google Trends shows a significant drop and Facebook’s recent acquisition of Wattsapp seemed like a drastic measure to acquire user base.
Similarweb also shows a significant decline from 25 billion visits in October 2013 to 21 billion visits in October 2014. It’s still massive but the decrease appears significant.
Almost a 20% drop in traffic YOY according to Similarweb
Google also appears to have definitively given up on using Facebook data as a ranking signal. You can read more on that here. This means that if you were hoping all those Facebook likes would increase your rankings you might want to rethink that strategy.
Conclusion
While I still think for many businesses there can be a lot of value in having a Facebook page I don’t think that it can be recommended to everyone like it was a year ago. If your website is informational then you’re probably better off spending extra time on Twitter than trying to create a Facebook audience depending on your niche.
A page on Tripadvisor for a restaurant would take preference over Facebook based on the performance I’ve seen for a recent local restaurant I created both a Tripadvisor and Facebook page for.
A Facebook page is still worth creating but if pressed for time there might be better options to help market your website. Expect less engagement than you would have gotten a year ago from Facebook.
