Facebook Pages: Impressions are down, but engagement is up

You can all stop whining now, Facebook Page owners. Your page and post impressions may have gone down, but your comments and likes are way up — doesn’t that make you feel good?

As it turns out, the decision to give Facebook Pages less visibility on the news feeds and Timelines may have been a blessing in disguise. A new study by Edgerank Checker reveals the following stats from week 2 of the Hybrid News Feed.

• Impressions are down at -25.15%
• Likes are up 9.43%
• Comments are up at 21.15%

User engagement is jumping, people are actually reading and approving of your content, and potentially brand-loyal consumers are making an effort to add to conversations you begin on your page. The only unfortunate downside is that although page impressions could potentially climb back up, they may not ever reach previously high levels. I’m inclined to believe this won’t bother you, however, as engagement is the real data you’ll want to keep an eye on.

This study comes after the analysis of 3,500+ Facebook Pages, all of which posted content on dates between both 9/3 – 9/17, and 9/24 – 10/8. After averaging everything on these pages from impressions and likes to comments and fans, EdgeRank summarized the findings to determine the following data.

This news might come as a surprise to those who remember our report on Saturday claiming some distressing news. That is, less than 1% of your “Daily Active Users” on Facebook are engaging your content. The engagement growth reported above, however, looks promising.

It’s definitely too early to decide whether this is how analytics will continue to look in the progressing months — especially with the Timeline still rolling out. Fortunately, the actual roll out to all users is not being delayed and is definitely expected in the coming weeks, so Facebook Page owners might be seeing stable and accurate data very soon.

You tell me: What do you think is behind impressions dropping and comments or likes starting to see some major action? What do you think the data will look like once Timelines have completely rolled out? Weigh in below.