If you’re like me, trying to find that sweet spot with Facebook posts is quite the daunting task. It raises the popular rapid-fire questions, “Who? What? Where? When? Why?” Who is your audience? What type of media are you posting? Where will it show up in people’s newsfeeds? When is the best time to post? Why are you posting it in the first place?
I recently came across this awesome study conducted by Simply Measured which looked at the Interbrand Top 100 Brands on Facebook from May 1st to June 30th, 2013. The report is hosted on slideshare and was a very informative read. Below, I’ve outlined what are, in my opinion, the key takeaways from the study. (P.S. if you have some time, you can check out the full report here.)
On Posts:
- Total brand engagement doesn’t appear to be closely tied to a brand’s average number of daily posts, which suggests that there is no hard and fast rule for how frequently brands should post
- The top 10 brands average 2.5 posts/day
- A larger variance exists in the number of times brands post, demonstrating the different approaches brands take to serving content
- So far, brand posts containing #hashtags are not driving additional engagement, but are performing at the same level as posts without hashtags, suggesting that people are not yet discovering brand posts by their tags
On Content:
- During May and June 2013, photos accounted for 74% of brand posts on Facebook and received 95% of total engagement on brand posts
- Photos are by far the most engaging type of content
- (Even though photos are the most engaging type of content, I still stand true that text status updates have the biggest reach. What is your goal with a specific Facebook post? If you want your post to reach the largest amount of people, I’d say post a text status update. If you’re looking for customers to engage with your posts, I’d say post visual content.)
- Primary drivers on engagement on Facebook (in order)
- Photo
- Video
- Status
- Link
- Question (This surprised me! Up to this point I had always believe that questions were supposed to be highly engaging content for Facebook. But it makes sense as a lot of the times that I post a question, I get an unsatisfactory amount of responses)
- Behold the power of visual content – photos and videos account for more than 80% of brands posts
On Engagement:
- 50-99 characters is the sweet spot for engaging status updates
- Top brands average an engagement rate of 12%
- Engagement rate = (likes + comments + shares) / page fans
- The average monthly engagement (fan posts, comments, shares and likes) for pages between 0-1M fans is 30,961
- Automotive brands are outperforming other industry verticals in engagement. What they’re doing differently and what you can learn from them:
- Post more frequently (2.1 posts/day); Share a higher percentage of photos (84%)
- Ability to sustain more engagement with high-quality photos of the cars their fans love
- Brands that don’t allow user posts receive less engagement, but more comments
- Might indicate that users are more likely to voice themselves in post comments when they can’t create their own posts on a brand page
As a sidenote, one additional key takeaway was that the majority of brands average only 1% to 2% monthly growth.
I hope this info can be as helpful to you as it was to me! Do you have any tips and tricks for Facebook engagement that have worked for you? Let us know in the comments below.