Abstract
A common claim is that Facebook steadily reduced the organic reach of pages. CrowdTangle does not record reach, but it does record the number of page likes at the time of each post, which allows engagement to be measured per follower. I use 506,179 posts from 112 party pages and 74 party leaders' pages in 20 European countries. Follower counts are absent before 2013 and sparse until late 2015, so the analysis covers January 2016 to September 2020. Comparing each page with itself, interactions per post per follower fell by about 25 to 35% from 2016 to 2018, depending on whether the unusually busy first months of 2016 are included. They reached a low in mid-2018 and then rose by about half, ending at or somewhat above their 2016 level in 2020. The fall and the recovery were found on most pages, on party and leader pages, and within each type of post, so they are not explained by the shift to video. There was no sudden fall at the News Feed changes of June 2016 or January 2018: the decline was gradual. Nor was it a mechanical effect of growing audiences: within pages, interactions rose roughly in proportion to followers. Over the period followers grew by about 93% and total monthly interactions by about 89%. Engagement per follower dipped and recovered rather than fading steadily, although engagement is not reach, and the years of the best known fall in organic reach, 2012 to 2014, lie outside what these data can measure.
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Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). A Dip, Not a Decline: Engagement per Follower on the Facebook Pages of European Parties and Leaders, 2016 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23416926