Large content sites that count on reader engagement on Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) sites to drive and hold traffic have a problem. A new study says engagement has eroded, particularly as measured against the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, the New York Times, Fox News, BBC, the Guardian, the India Times and Breitbart.
The numbers that we include in these rankings are based on the total numbers of likes, comments and shares made on all content that a given website publishes in a month. That includes all shares from a link on a publisher’s Facebook page, but also people sharing links on their friends’ profiles, and using on-site share buttons. Our rankings only look at engagement on articles published in the given month.
If we look back at 12 months of Facebook data for leading websites, there’s a noticeable decline in engagement. From what we’ve seen, this isn’t restricted to any one genre of site. We took a closer look at the trend, focussing on the very top cohort of sites in our monthly rankings.
Whether it is a trigger for the drop or not, engagement with video on Facebook has soared simultaneously.
In tandem with the decline in Facebook engagements with web content, Facebook native videos are well on the rise.
Everyone has heard about the massive potential the Facebook video now has for engagement. Some publishers have shifted strategy entirely to focus on the format.
As a result:
It’s hard to quantify, but it stands to reason that the increased attention on these videos mean that there’s less room to show everything in the news feed.
If people are spending more time watching and interacting with videos from the publishers that are posting them, they’ll see more and more. That means there’s less chance of them coming across a link to a story that their friend has liked.
Just as publishers believed they had Facebook figured out, they didn’t.
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