Rumours of Facebook’s demise have been greatly exaggerated

For the first time in the platform’s near twenty-year life, Facebook’s international user group declined last year. As well as an increasingly competitive market, internal industry developments, such as Apple’s app-tracking transparency update contributed to the company losing $10bn advertising revenue.

With the negative headlines, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s not quite the channel to focus all your resources on, especially as it is not usually the first platform that springs to mind when targeting key business decision-makers.

On top of this, other platforms like TikTok are experiencing a 100% year-on-year revenue increase, so, naturally, it would lead any marketer to question the role of Facebook in a marketing strategy.

However, we recently partnered with Competitive Advantage who took a deep dive into how main contractors are using communications channels, as part of its Construction Media Index, aimed at helping marketers understand how best to reach this audience. The research suggested that the rumours of Facebook’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, particularly amongst some professional groups who are still using it to connect with their audience.

The research found that a huge 94% of contractors are using Facebook regularly, up from 79% in 2021. That’s a nearly 20 percentage point increase in usage for a platform which is otherwise struggling to grow.

Contractors aren’t just mindlessly scrolling on the platform either, they’re using it to actively engage their audience. Almost a fifth (18%) are using Facebook to create awareness and promote business, that’s three times the amount using Instagram and nearly five times the amount using TikTok for the same reason. On top of this, Facebook only narrowly trails LinkedIn (22%), the predominant professional networking site.