If you run a business page on Facebook, Instagram or X and feel like fewer people are seeing your posts than a couple of years ago, you’re reading the numbers correctly. Socialinsider’s analysis of 70 million posts across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X found engagement sitting at just 0.48% on Instagram and 0.15% on Facebook in 2026, both essentially flat year on year at levels that would have looked disastrously low a decade ago (Socialinsider, 2026 Social Media Benchmarks). X fared worse still, dropping from 0.15% to 0.12%. This isn’t a temporary dip. It’s been the direction of travel for years, and I don’t think it’s reversing.
Why this happened, and why it isn’t an accident
The mechanics are fairly well understood at this point. Every major platform runs on advertising revenue, and the audience you’ve built organically on a page is, from the platform’s perspective, an asset it can monetise by making you pay to reach the very people who already chose to follow you. That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s the plainly stated business model, and it’s compounded by simple arithmetic, as the volume of content competing for the same feed space has grown enormously, meaning even a platform with no deliberate throttling would show declining reach purely from dilution.
The one platform bucking this trend in Socialinsider’s data is instructive. TikTok’s engagement rate climbed 49% year on year to 3.70%, comfortably the strongest of any major platform. That’s not because TikTok has been kinder to businesses, it’s because TikTok’s algorithm was built from the outset around interest-based distribution rather than follower-based distribution, surfacing content to anyone likely to find it engaging rather than only to people who’ve already followed an account. It’s a genuinely different model, not simply a temporary anomaly other platforms will eventually match.
The uncomfortable truth about your follower count
Here’s the part I think is worth sitting with properly, because it changes how you should think about the effort that goes into building a following in the first place. A large following on Facebook or Instagram today doesn’t translate into proportionate reach the way it once did. Spending years accumulating five thousand followers and then watching a typical post reach a few dozen of them is a genuinely different outcome to what building that same audience would have delivered in 2014. The followers are still real. The reach they once implied largely isn’t.
That doesn’t make building a social following worthless, engaged followers still matter for brand familiarity, social proof, and the small percentage who do see and act on your content. But it does mean a following built on a rented platform is a fundamentally less durable asset than the two channels we’ve covered elsewhere in this series, your email list and your own website. Nobody can change the algorithm governing how many of your email subscribers see your next newsletter. Nobody decides one day that your website’s content should be shown to fewer of the people looking for what you offer, short of a genuine ranking change based on quality, which is a fundamentally different kind of risk to a platform simply deciding to monetise your reach.
What I’d actually do differently
I wouldn’t recommend abandoning social media, it remains a genuinely useful channel for discovery, particularly through short-form video where the algorithmic model still rewards good content regardless of follower count. What I would recommend is treating social platforms as a top-of-funnel discovery layer rather than a relationship-management channel, and being deliberate about converting that discovery into something you actually own, an email sign-up, a genuine site visit, a saved bookmark, rather than assuming a follow is the end of the job.
The practical shift, and one I’ve made in how we think about ZenithSpark’s own content, is measuring social media less by follower count and more by how effectively it feeds the channels that don’t have an algorithm sitting between you and your audience. A social post that drives someone to subscribe to your email list has done genuinely durable work. A social post that racks up followers who’ll see maybe one in two hundred of your future updates has built something that looks like an asset but increasingly behaves like a lease, one the platform can quietly renegotiate at any time.
Rich Jarrott is the founder of ZenithSpark. Contact our “Chief Spark”.
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