How is Facebook marketing changing in 2019? Here are the latest findings on how marketers use Facebook.
A successful Facebook marketing strategy requires constant monitoring of the latest trends to ensure that you’re following Facebook’s best practices. Quintly has published a new study to help us understand how marketers use Facebook and what we can learn from their tactics.
They have decided to look at more than 105 million posts to understand how Facebook posting strategies are changing and what we can learn from them.
Here are the most interesting insights.
Link posts are still the most popular content type
If you’re wondering what type of content you should post on Facebook, you might have read from our previous posts that visual content tends to be effective on Facebook.
However, not all Pages agree, since Quintly found out that 54.9% of the posts that they’ve measured were shared links. Photos take 29.1% of the total posts and videos just 14.1%. It’s not a surprise that status posts take only 1.8% from all the posts.
These numbers don’t necessarily mean that link posts are more effective than the other content types, but they also make an easy option when you want to share an interesting article or a quick update about your Page. Since status posts are not preferred anymore, link posts make the second easiest way to publish new content. On the contrary, videos usually need more time to upload and they require more careful planning in your Facebook strategy.
Images versus videos
Images tend to be the most popular choices for smaller Facebook Pages. They are even more popular than link posts. For Pages with up to 10k fans, images make 54% of the content, with links following at 35% of the content. It’s interesting that Pages with more than 10 million fans don’t seem to prefer images compared to videos. In fact, images take only 25% of their content, with links being at 53% and videos at 22%.
Bigger Pages seem to use videos more frequently than the rest, which probably comes to the bigger budget and resources that they have as part of their strategy.
The next obvious question is, which content type brings the highest interaction then?
Analyzing the interaction for all content types
Link posts might be the most popular choice in the analyzed pages, but videos see the highest number of interactions.
- Videos tend to have 65% more interactions than images
- Images tend to have 105& more interactions than status updates
- Status updates have 50% less interactions than images
- Link posts have 72% less interactions than videos
What we can learn from these is that video content can be really engaging on Facebook. However, not all pages are able to create their own videos, especially on a frequent basis. Thus, images also make a good choice to engage with your audience.
Link posts can also make an easy way to share new content, but they still lack in the number of interactions compared to videos.
A good way to follow these interactions rates in your Page is to focus on the quality rather than the quantity. What if you share one video every week instead of three link posts? It should be a good experiment for your engagement rate and the impact it has on your Page’s performance.
What is the ideal post length?
A common question when it comes to Facebook posting is whether we should write short or longer captions in our posts. There might not be a right or wrong answer to this question, but it’s still useful to understand how Page Managers share their own content.
40.4% of the respondents use 51-150 characters in their posts. 25.3% of them use 151-300 characters. 13.5% of them pick captions of up to 50 characters. Only 12.5% of them create captions longer than 300 characters.
This means that we don’t necessarily need to create longer captions if the accompanying content is appealing on its own. For example, if you’re sharing an engaging image or video, you won’t need a large caption to convince your followers to pay attention to it. On the contrary, a link post may need a further explanation of the reasons that you’re sharing this link to your Page.
It’s useful to experiment with different post lengths in your Page so that you understand what your followers want to see from you. Sometimes even an emoji can be enough!
What’s the best day to publish a post?
An easy way to answer this question is to look at your Page’s insights and the most engaging days for your followers. However, it’s still useful to look at other Pages and the days that they prefer to share their own content.
According to quintly, there are 13.3% more interactions during the weekends compared to weekdays.
This could be due to:
- Smaller competition when Page Managers tend to schedule posts during weekdays
- People spending more time on Facebook in their free time
In both cases, it’s a good idea to experiment with different posting days and times than your usual ones.
Do people use Reactions?
Facebook introduced Post Reactions to help people express themselves more creatively. A “like” may still be the most popular option when people interact with content. However, the “love” reaction has also seen increased usage in 2018.
“Love” and “haha” seem to be the most popular choices after the like and it reminds us of the importance to create different content for different reactions.
If someone uses “haha” instead of “like”, it probably means that they enjoyed your post more than the usual ones. Thus, it’s useful to think of the emotions that your posts spark and how you can encourage more of them in the most natural way.
What’s next?
All these findings are really useful when we want to understand the changing marketing habits on Facebook. It may be challenging nowadays to survive simply with the use of the organic reach, but it’s also useful to understand how people interact with posts.
Don’t be afraid to try out different content types or posting times to improve your engagement rate.
Start noticing how each experiment affects your current metrics and repeat what’s working best for your Page.
For more on Facebook, also read:
- Facebook unveils its plans for 2019: What’s next?
- Strategies for how to test your Facebook ad campaigns
- By drawing stars like Kim Kardashian, Facebook Watch could be a real rival for YouTube
- Martech news roundup: Databricks and Gong.io funding, Twitter earnings, new Facebook Ads segments
- Martech news roundup: Facebook integrations, Kustomer funding, Adobe & Microsoft acquisitions