Facebook Engagement Jumps for Media, But Monetization Is Elusive (for now)

Facebook is being a little nicer to publishers again, but that doesn’t mean there’s any real improved revenue prospects there—yet.

At the start of the year, Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said that his company’s platforms would bring back “civic content” after years spent making political and news content less visible. This month, a NewsWhip report looking at 50 big publishers’ social performance in the first quarter found a 200% increase in engagement—ie, likes, comments and shares—those brands received on Facebook compared with the same quarter last year.

But evidence regarding referral traffic the platform has sent mixed signals.

Ad Fontes Media, the Boston Globe, Dow Jones all told AMO last month that they had seen either no change or a decrease in Facebook traffic year-on-year. Similarweb data provided to Press Gazette in April found a far more muted median 5.8% traffic increase among a group of 68 big titles. A social media staffer at a well-known but smaller British publication told AMO they’d seen neither traffic nor engagement rise.

It’s possible that engagement on Facebook has increased while traffic hasn’t. Meta wants to keep its users on its own platforms where it can serve them ads, rather than sending them elsewhere, and the Newswhip report found that the top-performing posts weren’t about news stories at all but rather photos and lighthearted viral moments. That means they’re also less likely to include links to stories in the first place.

A senior social staffer at a publisher who declined to be named who saw among the biggest engagement increases in the NewsWhip report told AMO the outlet had also seen a significant increase in traffic since November, when referrals hit a low. 

But while Facebook referral traffic was up in the half-year, year-on-year it remained flat. They credited the increases in large part to a decision to stop putting links in their posts altogether, instead adding them in the comments below.

The staffer said the engagement was not yet translating directly to revenue. They continue to monitor the situation as Facebook beta tests its new simplified monetization model under which photos, stories and text posts generate money based on engagement. (Currently pages can only earn money from videos or shortform Reels, or from all other types of content if they belong to the invite-only “performance bonus” program.)

Until then, social media experts suggested to AMO that publishers should see Facebook as a way to reach new audiences, not as a revenue or traffic driver.

The engagement change is “a good moment to test content that performs well in-platform, like short videos or carousels, and use that visibility to grow owned channels like newsletters. But treating Facebook as a primary growth engine again would be premature,” Sasha Berson, an executive at legal marketing consultancy Grow Law Firm, said. 

Facebook should be seen as “an amplifier, not a base,” according to Miruna Dragomi chief marketing officer for social media planning software firm Planable.

Leverage viral moments to bring users into your system—greet them with an e-mail newsletter, ask them to subscribe, direct them to a property that you own… The moral is to surf the wave when it arrives, but not mix it up with foundational support. Meta can ride the news when it is convenient, but publishers are not required to mix up timely relevance with faithful platform allegiance.