Over 70% of Facebook Pages inactive during October

Despite providing a plethora of tools to make Facebook Pages more attractive and functional for businesses and other groups, research by Recommend.ly found that just over 70% were inactive during October this year.

Community Pages were found to be the most likely to have zero updates posted in a month (79.3%) followed by company Pages (73.5%) and Pages set up by public figures (72.6%).

According to Recommend.ly, Pages that have selected a specific business category name such as 'restaurants/cafes' or 'spas', tend to be more active and focused on posting to Facebook. Nearly 50% of both (44.5% and 48.7% respectively) post between six and 99 updates per month.

When brands enter a social arena they must be sure to participate. However, the research found a worrying number of Pages, 83% overall, lack any participation at all whether it be sharing, Liking or commenting on a post either they, or their Fans, had created. The same categories that had zero updates in a month (community, company and public figure) were not participating on their Page.

"With the introduction of Timeline view, Facebook aimed to make Pages more popular with both businesses and fans. However, due to high levels of inactivity from Page owners and also falling engagement from fans, businesses are still not able to use Pages effectively," concludes Krishna Neelamraju on the Recommend.ly blog. "With visual content giving much higher engagement than before, businesses need to change their content strategies to be able to fully utilize the opportunity to access a social network with over one billion active users."

Tags: brand marketing, engagement, Facebook, social marketing, social media