BuzzSumo shared the following 8 Facebook Engagement Data core findings recently in their article How To Improve Facebook Engagement: Insights From 1bn Posts.
The findings come from an analysis they conducted in January, of 1 billion posts from 30 million brand pages on Facebook. Here’s what they found (emphasis added):
- The post formats that get the most engagement are questions and images.
- Short form text posts of less than 50 characters get the most interaction. It seems Facebook is not a place for reading but finding and engaging.
- Videos that are directly embedded get over six times the engagement of embedded YouTube videos.
- Surprisingly posts without hashtags get more interaction than posts with hashtags.
- Posts published between 10 PM and Midnight of your audience’s local time get the most engagement. It seems publishing when there are less posts being published, and vying for attention, increases engagement. Thus you should zig when others zag.
- Posts published on Sunday get more engagement on average. Again this seems due to less competition from other posts.
- Posts that link to longer form articles over over 1,000 words get the most engagement.
- Posting images via Instagram appear to provide a 23% increase in engagement.
Read the full article from BuzzSumo at How To Improve Facebook Engagement: Insights From 1bn Posts.
BuzzSumo shared their Facebook Engagement Data findings with Neil Patel of Quick Sprout and he did an in-depth look at the data. The results are available in his article How to Win on Facebook: 8 Lessons Learned From Analyzing 1 Billion Posts.
Neil concluded his analysis saying, “There’s one key thing that you need to remember to apply these findings effectively.” He then shared the following:
- Understand that these findings are correlations. They look at the average effect of different variables.
- What this means is that the findings are best practices.
- If your audience behaves significantly different than the average audience, your optimal Facebook posts may look different.
- These findings are great starting points, but they may or may not be right for you. Start by implementing them, but then test other options as well to confirm if they are the best or not.
Read the full article from Neil Patel of Quick Sprout at How to Win on Facebook: 8 Lessons Learned From Analyzing 1 Billion Posts.