When it comes to reaching out to users and a potential audience on Facebook, there is rarely an opportunity to become complacent. This is because there always appears to be major changes taking place on the popular social media site which impacts the results that certain actions obtain. It used to be that using photos and images was vital for reaching out to an audience on Facebook but now it seems as though these days are in the past. Recent studies undertaken by Socialbakers, a social media analytics firm indicates that of all the posts placed on brand pages, photo posts perform the poorest.
This is a game changer for many firms and businesses, and this means that many people are going to have to rethink the way that they operate their Facebook page. It appears that images and photo posts are seen at around half the rate of video content, which places video as being the new engagement opportunity when looking to build an audience on Facebook.
The analytical firm analysed over 670,000 pages by close to 4,500 brand pages (while ignoring entertainment, celebrity and media pages) between October of 2014 and February of this year and they came to their conclusion that video is the way to make an impact. It turned out that video posts hold an organic reach of 8.71%, which equates to nearly 9 people out of 100 seeing the post. Other findings suggest that text only updates reached 5.77%, link posts reached 5.29% and image content reached a level of 3.73%.
A further push to video content
This is a notable change but it is a change that will not be too surprising for Facebook analysts. Since July of last year, Facebook has been pushing video content in a major way with Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, indicating that the future of Facebook would be based around video. In November of 2014, Zuckerberg stated that in five years’ time, the majority of content on Facebook would be video content and he announced in January of 2015 that video content was receiving over 3 billion views a day on the site.
This is great news for the early adopters who have placed their focus on video content but what about the users who have focused on photos to boost their news feed. Socialbakers stated that 75% of all content brand pages, set up by the leading 30,000 brands on Facebook contained a photo. The fact that this information was stated less than a year ago, in April of 2014, indicates that there has been a massive change in such a short period of time.
One major issue came with the volume of brands that were using images as link bait and Facebook announced in August of 2014 that they would be looking to penalise brands and pages that engaged in this activity. This diluted the benefit of images for many brands but the use of images remained high, but it remains to be seen if there will be changes to the way brands populate their pages after this latest announcement.