Who Is Actually Still on Facebook?

Almost everyone, and not the people you think. Pew Research's 2025 survey of 5,022 US adults found 71% use Facebook, with the highest usage among 30 to 49 year olds at 80%. The 65 and over group was the lowest at 57%. Facebook is not where your parents went. It is where your customers are.

The "Facebook is for old people" story is the most expensive wrong idea in small business marketing, because it gets businesses to leave the platform their actual buyers use.

Who is really on it?

The age curve is the opposite shape to the one everyone assumes.

Pew's figures, from a survey conducted between February and June 2025, run like this: 80% of 30 to 49 year olds, 74% of 50 to 64 year olds, 68% of 18 to 29 year olds, and 57% of those 65 and over.

Read the ends of that range. The oldest group is the least likely to be on Facebook, not the most. And the 18 to 29 figure of 68% is not far off the 30 to 49 peak, which makes the idea that young people have abandoned it simply untrue.

For comparison in the same survey, Instagram sits at 50% of US adults and YouTube at 84%. Facebook at 71% remains the second most widely used platform in the country.

The group with the highest Facebook usage, 30 to 49, is also the group most likely to own a home, run a business, have children, and make significant purchase decisions. If you sell to adults with money, that is your audience.

If everyone is there, why is my reach so bad?

Because presence and distribution are different things, and organic distribution has been gone for years.

Socialinsider's Facebook benchmark study, which analyzed 25 million posts across 130,683 business pages between January 2024 and December 2025, puts the average organic engagement rate at 0.15% per post. Their own caveat applies here, the same one they attach to their other studies: figures published as 2026 are 2025 values, because the year was too young to have enough data.

A page with 5,000 followers, at that rate, is reaching a room of seven or eight engaged people per post.

That is not a content problem and it is not something you can fix by posting more. It is the business model. Facebook has an enormous audience and sells access to it.

So what still earns reach?

Formats Facebook wants to distribute, and almost nothing else.

That table is from the same study, and the last row is the important one. Link posts, the format most businesses default to because the whole point was to send people to their website, perform at a quarter of the rate of a plain status update.

The pattern is consistent across every platform I have looked at. LinkedIn puts link posts last too. Nobody wants to help you leave.

The same study found pages posting an average of 39 times a month, down 22% year over year. Everyone is posting less, because everyone has worked out what it returns.

Is Facebook still worth it for business?

Yes, but for three specific jobs rather than as a broadcast channel.

It is where people check you are real. Someone gets a recommendation, then looks you up. They find an active business or a page whose last post is from two years ago. That check costs you nothing to pass and a great deal to fail.

It is the best ad platform for most local businesses. The targeting, the volume and the cost still beat the alternatives for a lot of what small businesses sell. That is a paid channel decision, and I went through when it is worth it in the paid versus organic pillar.

It is where local community actually happens. Groups, events, marketplace, local recommendations. This is the part businesses ignore because it does not fit a content calendar.

What Facebook is not, any more, is a place to publish content and expect people to see it.

What should a local business actually post?

Fewer things, and none of them links.

Post the thing itself rather than a link to the thing. If you wrote an article, put the useful part in the post. If you have an offer, describe it in the post and let people message you.

Use Reels for anything that moves. They tie with albums as the second highest engaging format and Facebook is still pushing them, which means distribution beyond your own followers is at least possible.

Answer every comment and every message. Response rate is visible to people considering messaging you, and for a local business the inbox is worth more than the feed.

And keep the page current rather than active. Nobody needs to see you post daily. They need to see that you existed last month.

What about Groups?

Different tool, different job, and worth a real look for local businesses.

The claims about group reach circulating right now are large and poorly evidenced. Checking on the day I wrote this, I found figures of 20 to 40% of members reached per post against 1 to 6% for pages, and multiples of 10 to 30 times. None of those come with a stated methodology, and I would not plan around them.

What is defensible is the structural difference. A group is a place people opt into and return to deliberately. A page is a broadcaster in a feed that no longer distributes broadcasts. Those are not the same product, and the group is the one with the better relationship to how Facebook currently works.

I go through which one most businesses should actually pick in the group versus page comparison.

What about Marketplace and events?

The parts of Facebook that still have genuine organic distribution, and the parts most businesses never touch.

Marketplace is a search surface rather than a feed. People arrive with intent, looking for a specific thing, which makes it behave much more like a classifieds site than like social media. For anyone selling physical goods locally, that is a different and better proposition than posting into a feed that reaches 0.15% of followers.

Events work for a similar reason. An event has a date attached, which gives Facebook a reason to resurface it and gives attendees a reason to interact with it more than once. If you run anything with a time and a place, an event page does more than a post announcing the same thing.

Neither of these fits into a content calendar, which is exactly why they get skipped. The marketing function is organized around publishing, and these are not publishing.

How often should you actually post?

Less than you think, and consistently.

The Socialinsider figure of 39 posts a month across business pages is worth reading as a description of what people do rather than a recommendation. At a 0.15% engagement rate, doubling your posting doubles a very small number.

For most local businesses, two or three posts a week is enough to look alive, which is the actual job. Beyond that you are spending real time for very little marginal reach, and that time is almost always better spent on the inbox, on ads, or on the Google Business Profile.

The test is not whether you posted this week. It is whether someone who checks you out today finds a business that clearly still exists.

What I see in Facebook accounts

The same two mistakes, and they compound each other.

The first is a page that is almost entirely links out, posting three times a week into the format the data puts last, and concluding that Facebook is dead. It is not dead. It is declining to help you leave.

The second is abandonment based on the demographic myth. A business decides its customers are not on Facebook, moves everything to Instagram, and quietly loses touch with the 30 to 49 year olds who were actually buying. Instagram reaches 50% of US adults against Facebook's 71%, and skews younger. For plenty of businesses that is the wrong trade.

What to do on Monday

Open your page insights and look at the age breakdown of the people already following you. Not who you think your customer is. Who is actually there. That number decides more than any best practice in this post.

Then count your last twenty posts and see how many are links out. If it is most of them, move the link into the first comment and put the substance in the post. Same effort, considerably better distribution.

FAQ

Is Facebook still worth it for business in 2026? Yes, for three jobs: passing the credibility check when someone looks you up, running ads, and local community through groups and events. It is no longer worth much as a place to publish content and expect organic reach.

Who actually uses Facebook now? Pew Research's 2025 survey of 5,022 US adults found 71% of US adults use it, peaking at 80% among 30 to 49 year olds. Usage was lowest among those 65 and over at 57%, which is the reverse of the common assumption.

Why is my Facebook page reach so low? Because organic distribution for pages is minimal by design. Socialinsider's study of 25 million posts across 130,683 pages found an average engagement rate of 0.15%. That is a business model, not a content problem.

What is the best thing to post on a Facebook page? Plain status posts and Reels perform best, at 0.20% and 0.18% respectively. Link posts perform worst at 0.05%, so put the substance in the post and the link in the comments.

Should I use a Facebook page or a group? Most businesses need a page for credibility and ads. A group is worth adding when you have a genuine reason for people to return and talk to each other, not as a replacement for a page.

About the author

Adam Palmer is President of Inertia Digital Marketing, the agency behind Social Fonts. He has spent 15 years running paid and organic campaigns for clients ranging from single-location small businesses to national franchise networks, and has managed over $50 million in paid digital spend.