They run campaigns for fanbase.. more focus on numbers and less focus on content is the reason behind the dead engagement. Also, you can get a badge with some💸if you have some connections.:)

Many of them are fake followers, Also there are people who follow brands to get contest and freebie offers while they never engage
Also few created Insta accounts earlier but forgot the password or stopped using it... So most of them are always dead audience in case of big food and auto brands... You can see real engagement only on Entertainment and Mobile brands

They may be having fake followers, one more thing is possible, many ig handles does the 'Follow Unfollow" thing, in which the followers are increasing but they will not interact with posts and will not relate to it, resulting in less reach and not getting featured on explore page.

It is not about fake followers. Facebook organic reach only extended to an average of 2% of the page's total likes.

There are two sides to this story:
A) Fake followers.
B) Social Media for businesses doesn't allow every post to reach their complete audience. Based on the engagement of a small circle of fans FB/ insta expands the reach a little but that also stopsbecause FB wants the brand's to pay money to reach more people (or even to reach to their fans who have already been following). Now the key is to create great content that is shareable and relatable so that the reach increases organically. For example: we manage theCorner Housepage in FB and insta. Few posts which are not relatable has close to nil engagement but a lot of posts which actually gets the audience pumped has a lot of engagement organically. (Please note that we don't run ads on this account because Corner House is supposed to be a legacy brand with over 4 decades of presence so people are always excited to see a post from the brand but don't expect new pages/ brands to scale organically.

There are a few aspects to this that could be possible:

1. They bought fake followers to bring up the numbers. If you feel this is sad, look at point 2.

2. A lot of entry level digital agencies run campaigns for a very broad audience just to bring in likes/followers at a low cost. I have seen so many ad account handed over by my clients that had previous campaigns targeting 18-65+, India/Some state with no interest definition whatsoever. This results in a slow bleed out of the like or follower count over a period of time and obviously terrible engagement because there is no relevance for the audience.

3. They just produce mediocre content that nobody wants to interact with. Most often people who do the above end up producing sub-standard content only doubling the effect on low engagement.

Cheers!

Real engagement on digital/social media comes from two way dialogue groups, building engaged communities, also perhaps in the moment stories - hardly much from brand profiles, pages or posts. Those work more like a website does - provide information tothose who are actively seeking it. They aren't so much platforms to build audience engagement or influence. If a page is heavy on daily/frequent contests, discounts and offers - eg Dominos - those have a following to avail these, but you wouldn't see them engaging often either. Ads work too. But you need very deep pockets to get anything meaningful out of them either for most categories.