Yet another study has surfaced in which Facebook‘s engagement has taken a dive. This time, however, it’s directed at the way fans interact with tabs.

The social network began rolling out Timeline nearly five months ago. Then, there was a lot of back and forth regarding what kind of impact it would have on engagement.

PageLever, a Facebook analytics tool, took a look at how your fans interact with tabs specifically and found that engagement has decreased by 53 percent since Pages began adopting Timeline.

The company studied 500 Pages with more than 10,000 fans each. The data revealed a decline, which started on February 28th, the day you were able to enable Timeline. The drop is steeper on March 30th, when all Pages were forced to convert.

Jeff Widman, PageLever’s founder, believes that the inability to set a custom tab as your default landing page for non-fans has something to do with the drop off.

“Without the option to set a custom tab as the default view, most users will never see a tab again. We’ve heard from several users they didn’t even realize tabs still existed with Timeline.”

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however. It appears that Timeline is effectively putting the focus on other areas, such as your daily content, major milestones, and cover photo. The low interaction rate could just mean that you should spend less time worrying about tabs and more time focusing on your status updates.

And don’t forget that important updates, such as product releases, time-specific deals, and other announcements can be pinned to the top of your Timeline by clicking Highlight (the star icon).

[Via: Mashable, Image credit: Daniel Lobo]