If
you’re hoping to get fans/friends to interact with you more on Facebook
(and you should be!), posting photos is the best way to go. The worst?
Posting links. That’s something for small business owners to think about
in light of Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm.
Two recent studies came to this same conclusion about photos, link and other types of content on Facebook.
Web Liquid Facebook Reach Analysis
The first study that I’ll mention comes
from Web Liquid, a digital marketing company. They studied 16 brands
with 3.5 million combined Facebook fans. More than 1,500 brand posts
were analyzed between March and May, 2011.
This chart compares the interaction levels of four different types of Facebook posts:
Photos
and videos both drew more than double the interaction that links did.
Web Liquid also studied the reach of each type of content and found that
the top two were flipped: videos generated the most reach (i.e., they
spread further to friends of fans, etc.) and photos generated the
second-most reach.
Momentus Media: Facebook Engagement & Interaction
Earlier this year, Momentus Media did a somewhat similar study that analyzed 20,000 Facebook business/brand pages and analyzed tens/hundreds of thousands of Facebook posts.
Their
findings were similar to what you’ve seen above: Photos get the most
interaction, while links get the least. This study differs a bit in the
middle — it found that text/status updates attracted more interaction
than videos.
This study offers a lot more data about business/brand activity on Facebook. You can download it from Momentus Media’s website.
EdgeRank: Why Interaction Matters
The
reason all of this matters is EdgeRank. That’s the name of the
algorithm that Facebook uses to determine what content shows up in its
users’ Newsfeed. There’s a great EdgeRank guide on eConsultancy, but the Cliffs Notes version is this: The more a user interacts with your content, the more your future content will continue to show in his/her Newsfeed.
There
was a study earlier this year that showed about 5% of Facebooks fans
ever see posts to Facebook Pages. Yikes! That’s because of EdgeRank.
So,
if you want your fans to see more of your content, keep in mind the
types of content that they interact with more often. If they’re not
interacting with you on Facebook, you might be wasting a lot of time.
