Facebook Pages saw slight growth in organic likes in July, according to a report from Locowise, which studied 5,000 pages. Growth was 0.21% in July, which was up from 0.2% growth in May.

“This number was at 0.1% for the largest pages, those with over 1 million page likes,” says Locowise’s Marko Saric. “Even the smallest pages, those with less than a thousand page likes, had a difficult time growing organically with a 0.3% growth of page likes. This confirms once again that Facebook is now a pay to play platform, especially if you’re looking into page growth.”

The report also found that 54.05% of the largest pages use Facebook advertising.

“41.12% of all pages we looked at in our study used Facebook ads paying for 28.56% of the total reach. This is a small decrease compared to 43.36% we saw using ads in the month of May,” adds Saric. “Facebook “54.05% of pages with over 1 million page likes used advertising, paying for 29.94% of their reach. This is a 12% increase compared to May where 48.28% of the largest pages were using ads.”

Meanwhile, it finds that organic post reach and engagement rates are down with average post reach at 8.24% of the total page audience. That’s down from 8.34% in May. For the biggest pages it was 6.66% and for the smallest pages it was 13.85%.

Average engagement rate was 6.27%, down 6% from May. For the biggest pages it was 6.73% but down 25% from May.

As the report notes, the new “See First” feature recently announced by Facebook could help pages boost organic reach if they’re able to convince fans to enable it.

Check out the report here. It gets more into Facebook’s video and ecommerce efforts in addition to more insights about the previously discussed topics.

Last month, we looked at research from Adobe, which found that people are interacting more with links.

Image via Locowise