The Declining Organic Reach Of Facebook Photo Posts
The social media landscape is constantly evolving, and it’s important for marketers of all types to stay on top of these changes to ensure that they get the best ROI when working in this realm. Although posting photos on Facebook used to be the top way to engage consumers, according to new data from social media analytics company Socialbakers, videos have taken over this position.
For its study, Socialbakers looked at over 670,000 posts by 4,445 brand pages (not including celebrity, entertainment or media pages) between October 2014 and February 2015. The findings illustrate that video posts had an organic reach of 8.71 percent, or in other words, that almost 9 fans out of 100 saw them. Photo posts were actually found to be the lowest of all, at 3.73 percent, while text-only statuses had a reach of 5.77 percent and link posts were at 5.29 percent.
This data clearly illustrates some major changes over the past year with the organic reach of photo posts having fallen dramatically. Just last April, Socialbakers reported that photo posts were driving major engagement, with 87 percent of interactions on the top 10 percent of the brand posts that were studied coming from photo posts. Many Page administrators saw this as an opportunity to use photos as link bait, using photo posts to drive reach by including links in captions as a method to get clicks back to their sites. However, Facebook responded to this trend by cracking down on the practice, choosing to favor posts using the social network’s native link format over the photos-with-links-in-captions workaround that had gained popularity.
Facebook has been making a massive video push since last June, so the news of its increasing engagement on the social media network isn’t a complete surprise. Additionally, it is not an absolute change. Compelling photo posts by brands can still drive engagement, and marketers may choose to utilize a combination of methods to achieve the most effective results.
It has become increasingly difficult to achieve organic reach on Facebook, due to the growing competition in the News Feed from people, businesses and brands, and many marketers are turning to paying for promoted posts to increase their presence. Socialbakers data illustrates this fact, with only 9 percent of overall Page posts being promoted in 2013, while this number was almost double in the fourth quarter of 2014 at 17 percent. While Page administrators were found to be promoting photo posts at the rate of 17 percent in Q4 of 2014, the percentage was higher for videos at 27 percent.
The following data from Socialbakers’ new study illustrates the dominance of videos in the fourth quarter of 2014, showing the breakdown of post-based organic reach:
For Pages with more than 100,000 likes, the results were lower:
Jan Rezab, CEO of Socialbakers, discussed this new data with Business Insider. “Video is proving to be a very engaging format and gaining in popularity; consumers really like them,” said Rezab. “As we’ve said before, video has fast become the new photo and is the biggest trend we’re seeing in social right now. Therefore we’d advise marketers to include video as part of their content strategies.”
Does this mean that marketers should stop posting photos?
Although the reach of video is clearly growing on Facebook, photos can still effectively drive engagement, provided that the images are compelling. The best strategy is to develop campaigns that are thoughtfully designed to appeal to the specific consumers that are being targeted, by utilizing a combination of media types featuring content that will truly resonate with the brand’s audience.
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