Time is one of the most precious resources we have.

Let me make a confession: according to my phone logs, I spent a whopping 5 hours and 4 minutes on Facebook in a single week this month. I know, I’m even shaking my head at me.

Granted, some of those days I was ill in bed and deliberately trying to pass the time with nonsense. However, in a bid to make my time wasting a bit more useful, I thought I’d use my feed to conduct a somewhat non-scientific analysis of how much of the time we spend on Facebook is actually wasted.

To define “wasted” I decided to keep it simple: anything in my feed that was not posted directly by an existing connection was counted as a “waste” of time. That included adverts, posts in groups that are not from friends, posts from people I don’t know, new articles from pages I don’t follow, and stories in my feed that were not from friends.

Using a simple count of 100 posts, the outcome was surprisingly high.

On my first count, 94 posts were not from friends. That’s 94% of my feed unsolicited advertising or content I didn’t ask for and don’t want.

Of the 6 friend posts that I counted, 4 of them were from the same 2 people. In terms of friends posting, in real terms there were only 4 out of that original count of 100.

That equates around 285 minutes looking at adverts in a single week (on Facebook alone). Even for a marketer who has more than a passing interest in adverts, that’s pretty high.

I was curious. Was this 94/100 count typical. No doubt Facebook will claim it isn’t.

So, to misquote Britney Spears, I did it again. And again. And again.

Different times of the day. Different days of the week. And the results were consistent:

• 96/100
• 94/100
• 95/100

I understand all too well the power of platforms like Facebook. I’ve built campaigns, driven results, and watched in real time how “relevant” content can fuel awareness and action. But there’s another side to this — one that individuals and marketers rarely stop to consider. Behind the metrics and media spend lies a creeping inefficiency: how much time is being lost to Facebook?

This pattern tells us something vital: Facebook feed is no longer a social tool, it’s an advertising feed. This is despite it being ranked by Hootsuite as the most popular social network in the world in 2024.

But is Facebook now just an illusion of relevance? When between only 3–6% of what we see is from actual connections, its meaningful relevance collapses.

The average adult in the UK spends over 30 minutes per day on Facebook. That equates to over 182 hours a year or the equivalent of 24 full working days. And if 94% of that time is wasted, then you are kissing goodbye to 22.5 working days equivalent of time (much of which is probably your free time or time with your family).

As an agency we are in the privileged position of seeing Facebook metrics across a range of different business types, and in tracking trends over longer periods of time. So, what are we seeing? It’s definitely declining as a commercial channel, reach is plummeting, engagement isn’t too far behind. The audience is also ageing, so if you are looking to target the young ones, it’s not your channel.

Every dog has its day and, I’m not saying Facebook has had its day, the signs are not good. Some brands are switching from organic content to straight advertising, the return on efforts no longer adding up. Smaller businesses are still clinging on, others are simply posting into the void.

Either way, once you notice all you’re getting is adverts, it’s not long before you switch off the app altogether.

Facebook remains a powerful channel but, like any channel, its only as good as its users. We may be their “product” so to speak, but when it’s a “free” service there still needs to be a balance of give and take and I’d argue that wasting 94% of users’ time is more take than give.

Next time you start scrolling out of habit, take 2 minutes out to really look at what you are seeing, then ask yourself honestly: is this really a good use of my time?