Want your audience to be more engaged with your content on Facebook? Post a video.
That’s the official news form social media tracking agency Socialbakers. Videos are now king and nearly twice as likely to be viewed as photos.
Socialbakers analyzed more than 670,000 posts by 4,445 brand pages (not including entertainment, media or celebrity pages) from October 2014 to February 2015. They found that videos had an organic reach of 8.7 percent, or about nine out of every 100 fans see them. Photos only scored 3.7 percent — actually below text-only posts at 5.8 percent and links at 5.3 percent.
See the chart below:
“Because photos were the long-dominant post type, they are both the most common type of post and the most frequently promoted,” the Socialbakers report states. “That alone would be enough to make them less effective than they were at their peak, but coupled with the introduction of videos in Q3 2014, the decline in photo reach has been sudden.
“That all adds up to a lot of competition for decreasing space.”
And the decreasing space is ever-dominated by the number of increasing videos. They report that since there are more photos than videos, the “the new format is still far more effective at reaching audiences.”
As Marketing Land reports, Facebook has been pushing video since last June. In November, Mark Zuckerberg said most content on the site would be video within five years, and in January, Facebook reported that it was getting 3 billion video views per day.
Could this mean more cute animal videos, fewer baby shots? We certainly hope so.
