8 Lessons Learned From Analyzing 1 Billion Posts
Social media guru Neil Patel recently presented the results of a comprehensive study of more than 1 billion Facebook posts, which reveals interesting data on the types of posts that generate the strongest engagement.
The post data, compiled by buzzsumo.com in January, tracked more than 1 billion posts from 30,000 brand pages on Facebook to discover patterns among posts which generated the strongest customer engagement. This is extremely timely data, as other recent studies have shown that Facebook is quickly becoming more influential than Google in content discovery and driving traffic to different web pages. Web analytics firm Parse.ly, for example, determined that social media has now overtaken search engines as a means of driving traffic to websites, with Facebook accounting for 90% of the traffic. The Facebook news feed, designed to sift through web traffic and create a news feed of relevant content for users, is attributed to having significantly contributed to this growth.
This makes findings from the buzzsumo.com study particularly relevant to any business attempting to market through Facebook. The group shared its findings with social media expert Neil Patel, who pulled out several key insights. You can read his full analysis online at www.quicksprout.com/2016/02/05/how-to-win-on-facebook-8-lessons-learned-from-analyzing-1-billion-posts/ But the key take-aways are these eight points:
- Posts published between 10 PM and midnight of your audience’s local time get the most engagement.
Late evening is a key time for people to view social media – it’s the end of the day and they’re looking to unwind before bed. It’s also when overall posting traffic is at its lowest, so there’s less competition for a reader’s attention. In short, late evening is reading time, not posting time. Publish your posts then, when they’re more likely to be seen, and readers are more likely to embrace your content.
- Posts published on Sunday also draw significantly higher engagement.
The same principles for late evening also apply to Sundays – posts published on our day of rest tend to be better read, and draw greater levels of engagement than for any other day of the week.
- The post formats that get the most engagement are questions and images.
There are essentially six types of promotional posts a company can create on its Facebook business page – questions, image posts, videos, links, giveaways and coupons/discounts. Questions and image posts significantly outperformed all other types in engaging with customers. Posts which combined a question with an image out-performed all other types combined.
The lowest-performing posts? Coupons and discounts, and by a landslide. Consumers have grown suspicious of online incentives, most of which only serve to gather their contact information for marketing use. Or, more to the point, they’re seen as “spam bait.”
- Short form text posts of less than 50 characters get the most interaction.
It seems the shorter and more concise your post, the better it will do. Posts of less than 50 charac-ters consistently outperformed all others.
- Posts that link to longer form articles over 1,000 words get the most engagement.
Keep your Facebook posts short, but feel free to link to longer content. If you have something more to say, post it on your website and link to its page. The optimal length for linked content is between 1,000 to 2,000 words.
- Videos that are directly embedded get over six times the engagement of embedded YouTube videos.
You wouldn’t think the source of a video would make any difference, but apparently it does. Facebook posts with embedded videos draw substantially higher rates of engagement than those which link to videos hosted on third-party sites like YouTube or Vimeo.
- Posts without hashtags get more interaction than posts with hashtags.
Hashtags – those little titles preceeded by a #, as in #RVDealerNews – were created to make certain topics searchable and increase engagement levels. But it doesn’t seem to work that way on Facebook. Posts without hashtags outperformed those with them by a whopping 34%.
- Posting images via Instagram for greater engagement.
Photos posted directly onto Facebook draw traffic. But posts with photos posted through Instagram were found to draw up to 23% more traffic, and were more effective in driving customer engagement. Upload your photos to Instagram, and use the utility’s “post to facebook” option for maximum exposure.
These eight points can help you boost consumer engagement on your company’s Facebook page. But it is important to understand the data is based on averages, and not everyone will see the same results. Even so – even small gains can produce big wins.
