Publishers Posting to Facebook Decreased by 8 Points in 2023

The question of whether or not a publisher wants to post content and advertising on social media platform has become quite pertinent these days. Twitter, which Elon Musk has now rebranded to X, has seen a dramatic decline in referral traffic. Meta’s answer to Twitter, Threads, has seen a similarly tough environment, struggling to receive the amount of publisher attention that Mark Zuckerberg had undoubtedly been hoping for.

A new survey conducted by Digiday+ Research which asked questions of 200 individuals working in the publishing industry shed some light on how things have changed in 2021. 2021 was an especially bad year for Facebook with 95% of publishers saying that they are going to post content on the social media platform with all things having been considered and taken into account.

This increased to 99% in 2022, but in spite of the fact that this is the case, 2023 ended up becoming Facebook’s worst year yet. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that just 91% of publishers admitted that they are willing to work with Facebook this year, which is a steep 8 point decline from the 99% that said the same last year.

Such a drop is concerning because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up making Facebook far less relevant than it used to be. There was a time when Facebook was considered to be the foremost social media platform thanks to its widespread reach. These recent developments seem to indicate that Facebook is starting to hold less sway than might have been the case otherwise.

One thing that bears mentioning is that this proportion refers to the number of publishers that have posted content to Facebook over the course of the previous month. Things start to seem even more dire when we widen the scope to take a look at how many publishers are posting their content on a daily basis.

Back in 2021, 85% of publishers said that their content ends up on Facebook each and every day. This dropped to 74% in 2022, although 2023 saw only a single point decrease to reach 73%. At the same time, more and more publishers are opting for weekly posts. Only 13% of publishers stated that they make weekly posts to Facebook in 2021, and by 2022, this had increased to 24% before declining somewhat to 23% by 2023.

This seems to suggest that publishers are now preferring to make weekly posts instead of daily ones, confirming that Facebook appears to be losing favor among them. The numerous controversies it has experienced including the revelation that it tries to stoke anger among its users to boost engagement have left a bad taste in the mouths of publishers. Furthermore, Facebook does not seem to have the same level of influence among the younger demographics.

It will be interesting to see where things go from here on out. We may be entering a day and age where Facebook will no longer be the single most powerful social media platform at least as far as publishers are concerned which could create a ripple effect down the line.

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by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World