Photos Draw Most Facebook Interactions, Links Draw the Least

If you’re hoping to get fans/friends to interact with you more on Facebook (and you should be!), posting photos is the best way to go. The worst? Posting links. That’s something for small business owners to think about in light of Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm.

Two recent studies came to this same conclusion about photos, link and other types of content on Facebook.

Web Liquid Facebook Reach Analysis

The first study that I’ll mention comes from Web Liquid, a digital marketing company. They studied 16 brands with 3.5 million combined Facebook fans. More than 1,500 brand posts were analyzed between March and May, 2011.

This chart compares the interaction levels of four different types of Facebook posts:

Photos and videos both drew more than double the interaction that links did. Web Liquid also studied the reach of each type of content and found that the top two were flipped: videos generated the most reach (i.e., they spread further to friends of fans, etc.) and photos generated the second-most reach.

You can download the report from Web Liquid’s website; name and email address are required.

Momentus Media: Facebook Engagement & Interaction

Earlier this year, Momentus Media did a somewhat similar study that analyzed 20,000 Facebook business/brand pages and analyzed tens/hundreds of thousands of Facebook posts.

Their findings were similar to what you’ve seen above: Photos get the most interaction, while links get the least. This study differs a bit in the middle — it found that text/status updates attracted more interaction than videos.

This study offers a lot more data about business/brand activity on Facebook. You can download it from Momentus Media’s website.

EdgeRank: Why Interaction Matters

The reason all of this matters is EdgeRank. That’s the name of the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine what content shows up in its users’ Newsfeed. There’s a great EdgeRank guide on eConsultancy, but the Cliffs Notes version is this: The more a user interacts with your content, the more your future content will continue to show in his/her Newsfeed.

There was a study earlier this year that showed about 5% of Facebooks fans ever see posts to Facebook Pages. Yikes! That’s because of EdgeRank.

So, if you want your fans to see more of your content, keep in mind the types of content that they interact with more often. If they’re not interacting with you on Facebook, you might be wasting a lot of time.