The incessant chatter of Facebook posts means it’s tough to get heard. Upwards of 15 million brands and companies push out messages on Mark Zuckerberg’s social network, vying for the attention of its 1.28 billion users, including 71% of the adult US population.
Most of it we ignore. Some we love, we like, we share. So what’s the secret?
According to a new survey from TrackMaven, which analysed 5,800 pages and 1.5 million posts, there’s a clear pattern: it’s most crowded during the weekdays, but people pay more attention at weekends.
Posts received an average of 2.27 ‘engagements’ (including likes, comments and shares) on weekdays. On Sundays it was 2.72 per post. Thursdays are number one for posting activity, accounting for 16.82% of posts, with Wednesdays and Tuesdays close behind. Only 9.04% of posts are published on a Sunday.
Times of day matter too. Most companies post their updates between 8am and 5pm, gaining an engagement level of 2.24 on average. But those who post after hours, between 5pm and 1am, get an engagement boost – up to 2.49.
Content variables make plenty of difference. Exclamation marks, question marks and hashtags are all good, all increase engagement and make the post more appealing, says TrackMaven.
“The trends indicate an overall correlation between effectiveness and greater personalisation of Facebook content,” notes the analyst. Things like exclamation marks and hashtags “appeal to our curiosity, excitability and innate desire for conversation.”
It’s a further iteration of the trend away from ‘push’ marketing and towards the ‘pull’ of brand-user interaction which has taken its place. “Marketers are intelligently engaging their audience with content that builds a social bond,” states TrackMaven.
Brevity is good, but with a quirk: Facebook posts that are 70-79 words long have an average of 3.42 interactions, whereas those of 80-89 words get 6.19 interactions.
The survey’s authors reckon this is probably due to the ‘continue reading’ link on Facebook, which intrigues readers. “Our brains have a tendency to shift our preferences towards things we invest energy into,” according to behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely, quoted by in the survey write-up. “Users are more likely to interact with posts that require a longer investment of time to read to completion.”
There are common sense explanations for much of these results. People have more time at weekends and so feel more inclined to write comments, share or like posts. In the working week, by contrast, there may be limits to Facebook use, or a generalized disapproval by managers of social media as a distraction.
Among the calls to action that companies add to their posts, the word ‘share’ was the most effective, doubling the level of engagement, whereas ‘now’ made little difference. But the report warns that Facebook’s latest News Feed algorithms penalize pages that ‘fish’ for likes and shares. And although people do often respond to these calls, Facebook has found that users rate such content 15% less relevant, says TrackMaven.
Pictures remain a top way to attract users, which is as it should be: it’s a Facebook, not a Wordbook.
In the future, using the moving image to catch people’s attention will increasingly cut through much of the chatter. Viva video!
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