Influencer Marketing Grew Whilst Facebook Activity Decreased in 2016

Platforms for influencer marketing such as Mavrck and others have published a great number of statistically sound studies on Facebook marketing. A lot of this research focuses on how the algorithm of the world’s most populated social network has affected engagement with the branded content marketers and other influencers pay for. Mavrck carried out one study that examined 25 million Facebook posts, and what they’ve learned is somewhat surprising.

Engagement is Actually Going Down

For starters, user engagement on Facebook is actually down, all across the board. It’s down by 15.4 percent (the 2016 figures compared to the previous year). So far in 2017 it appears to be down by 11.4 percent. To break it down even further, ‘likes’ per post is down 7.8 percent, comments per post are down by 37.5 percent and ‘shares’ are down by 27.8 percent.

People are Posting Less

Not only are Facebook users engaging less with posts, there are also less posts to engage with. In fact, posts went down by a whopping 29.5 percent from 2015 to 2016.

The Importance of Influencers

Facebook content that’s created by popular users which features brand content actually does a lot better in terms of engagement and directed traffic than content that’s generated by the brand. The most popular influencers (those who generate more Facebook views than 75 percent of the entire social network) have engagement rates that are at least three and a half times higher than sponsored brand content.

Of course these findings are disconcerting for internet marketers with many clinging to the belief that this downturn in engagement and posting was the result of a poor algorithm change at the beginning of 2016 that was quickly reversed in March. This opinion is not entirely unfounded either seeing as how by the end of 2016 there was an increase in engagement to the tune of 26 percent.

Whether this trend continues into 2017 remains to be seen. In the meantime, it seems that marketers are going to start going after popular Facebook users and influencers for endorsements.

The entire report can be downloaded directly from Mavrck.

 

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