I realize this isn’t the type of headline you’ve become accustomed to over he past year or two. Facebook Pages have by and large seen the organic reach of most of their posts fall considerably as competition for News Feed space has increased and Facebook itself has repeatedly adjusted its algorithm.

How have your organic reach numbers been in the past month or two? Have you seen any improvement? Let us know.

A new study, however, finds that he average reach per post for Pages has increased by 103% month-over-month. More interesting yet is that this has occurred while there has also been a 58% decrease in engagement per post.

These numbers come from Locowise, which analyzed 5,000 pages and their growth, reach and engagement results in May.

“The average reach per post for pages we looked at was at 8.34% of all page likes in the month of May. This is a 103% increase compared to the 4.11% in April, and is very positive news for brands struggling to reach their audience organically,” the report says. “The larger the page the less organic reach there is per post though. For pages with over 1,000,000 likes the average reach was 6.62% while for the smallest pages the reach was 14.88% of their audience.”

“The reach per post may be up but the engagement per post is down,” it continues. “The average engagement per post was at 6.61% of people reached. This is a 58% decrease compared to the 15.58% engagement we saw in April. The largest pages (those with over 1 million likes) had an above-average engagement of 8.92% of people reached. This means that the average engagement per post is at 0.55% of all page likes, which again is poor compared to the 2.81% engagement of total following that we see on Instagram.”

This certainly isn’t the first time in recent memory we’ve heard about how much better engagement has been for brands on Instagram compared to Facebook.

The study found that Pages saw an 11% increase in Page likes from April to May. Over 43% of Pages are using Facebook ads. They’re effectively buying nearly 32% of their reach.

“Brands are realising that paid advertising is a great solution for their goals of growing a page and reaching a new audience,” the report says. “This is actually a 503% increase compared to only 7.19% of pages we saw using ads in April.”

Facebook announced in February that it had over two million active advertisers (here’s a look at some improvements it has made to its ad products on the way to that number). Just this week, it made its Ads Manager app available on Android, enabling many more of their advertisers to manage their ads from their mobile devices (it was previously available for iOS). This will likely only contribute to increased Facebook advertising.

When it comes to organic reach, videos are reaching more users than any other type of post. In February, Socialbakers shared some data showing this:

If the Locowise study is any indication, videos are only doing better than they were then:

It’s definitely worth comparing the other post types in these two charts. Status updates seem to not be going so far, while links appear to be doing better. Facebook recently launched an “Add a Link” feature, which will only encourage more link sharing.

While videos may lead the pack in reach, they’re still not seeing the engagement of photos, according to the study, which have 7.06% of people reached engaging on average compared to videos at 6.61%. Links are at 4.37% with status updates at 3.34%.

It’s worth noting that since the month when these numbers were collected, Facebook has announced that it will begin taking some other things into account when ranking content in News Feed. These include the time people spend on posts and specific video actions, such as unmuting and enabling HD.

Have you seen increased organic reach on your posts? Have you increased your Facebook advertising efforts? Let us know in the comments.

Images via Facebook, Socialbakers, Locowise