Facebook Pages didn’t have the greatest year in 2015 if a new study is any indication. Locowise is sharing data looking at page growth, post reach, and engagement on the social network throughout the past eight months, and when it comes to the organic growth of Page likes, December saw the lowest rate yet.

Has this been an area of concern for your Facebook presence? Discuss.

Here’s a quick look at the numbers across page growth, page reach, and post engagement reach from May to December:

As you can see, it’s a little disconcerting across the board.

“If you do want to grow your page audience in the year 2016 you simply do need to use paid advertising,” says Locowise’s Marko Saric. “Don’t get your hopes up that creating amazing content will get you there on its own.”

At least post reach has risen over the past couple months, but it’s still well below what it was in May.

Paid post reach is down significantly from May as well:

“The best organic way to optimize your post reach in 2016 is by using the post format that has the highest reach. This is on top of posting on the best day of the week and the time of the day,” says Saric.

Here’s the study’s data by post format for reach and engagement rate:

Reach and engagement are down from May across all post formats, except for Status, where engagement rate is slightly up (though still down from more recent months).

You can see the full report here.

We recently looked at some research from Socialbakers, which found that when it comes to Facebook posts, shares appear to be significantly more important than either likes or comments, when it comes to increasing your reach and audience. So keep that in mind if you’re looking for more viral reach (this refers to those who saw a story in their News Feed or Ticker only because of one or more of their friends interacted with it).

Despite it being harder to organically grow your Facebook audience, Facebook has been adding business-friendly features to Pages.

Last month, Facebook said that over 50 million businesses are now using Facebook Pages and that these pages see 2.5 billion comments each month.

The company also announced that you can now set the average time it takes for your page to reply to messages. This could be “within minutes,” “within an hour,” “within hours,” or “within a day”. There’s also a redesigned inbox that gives businesses more info about their customers and an easier way to respond to and keep track of comments in the form of a tool under the new Activity tab. You can flag interactions for follow-up, reply privately, mark them as done, etc.

All of this is still in the process of rolling out.

Does the data reflect your Page’s experience? Are you seeing more success with certain post types? Discuss in the comments.

Images via Facebook, Locowise, Socialbakers