“If you want to know what works when it comes to marketing, you need to study the competition” Neil Patel, 2016
At the beginning of 2016, the Buzzsumo team decided to proceed to an in-depth analysis on the marketing on Facebook and analysed over 1 billion posts from 30 million brand pages. They came up with findings that will undoubtedly change the way you market on Facebook.
These are the 8 lessons learned from analysing 1 billion posts:
- Posts published between 10pm and Midnight of your audience’s local time, get the most engagement. It makes sense to post when users are online, however the analysis found the exact opposite. Since there is too much competition during peak times (during the day), engagement is at its lowest.
- Question-posts combined with images get the most engagement (reach, likes, comments and shares). Conversely, videos, links and discounts receive much less engagement. However, it is worth mentioning that videos get the highest number of average shares, so if you are looking for shares go with it.
- Save your important posts for weekends, especially Sundays!
- Posts that link to articles between 1.000-3.000 words get the most interaction.
- Short post descriptions (usually 0-50 characters) get by far the most interaction.
- Directly embedded videos get over 6 times the engagement of embedded YouTube videos. So, if you would like to publish a video on Facebook, take the time to upload it onto Facebook itself.
- Pictures that are posted on Facebook through Instagram received 23% more interactions than images uploaded directly to Facebook.
- Posts without hashtags outperform those with hashtags, so don’t bother using them. They only reduce your posts’ engagement.
source: Neil Pate, Quicksprout.com, February 2016
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