Over the last 18 months, Socialbakers data shows that companies have been publishing Facebook posts less frequently, and promoting more of those posts than ever before.

On average, company Pages have gone from publishing nearly 200 posts in Q4 2014 to only about 120 posts in Q1 2016. Meanwhile, media publishers have increased their publishing speed over time, publishing an average of almost 3,000 posts per quarter.



While the number of total interactions have increased somewhat as each Page publishes less on average, the story behind it is not so simple: in reality, total interactions may be up - but so are the number of promoted posts. Relatively more content is being promoted, but our data show that those promoted posts haven’t gotten any more efficient.

In other words, marketers are having trouble promoting the right content.


Promoted posts make up 35% of all published content now, up from just 25% in Q4 2014. But even though companies are promoting more, total interactions have stayed about the same.

This inefficiency likely comes from marketers promoting content too soon after publishing it (before they can see if it will actually succeed), or from those who are committed to promoting campaigns and content that may not be working.

Early organic performance is a great indicator of how a post will perform after it’s promoted. If a post performs worse than most of your recent content, it’s not going to turn into a winner once you put more of your budget behind it.

Too many companies are spending money the wrong way while advertising on Facebook. Our recent study on content quality showed that 44% of all promoted posts perform below average according to each Page’s standards. That doesn’t just mean these Pages are missing out on interactions they could otherwise be getting. It means they are:

• Paying double for each click (CPC)
• Paying 20% more for every 1000 impressions (CPM)
• Getting 4x more negative feedback on their below-average posts than they do on their best posts

In order for marketers to improve promoted post efficiency, save money, and increase the value they get out of social media, it’s critical that they become more aware of what they promote, and how their promoted posts will likely perform.