In January 2018, Facebook made a huge update to its News Feed algorithm. In the company’s official statement, they noted the reason for the change was to give users more opportunity to interact with the people and content they really care about. This new change would go on to affect what kind of content is seen more frequently and what is seen first. So, how did this change affect the content strategy of small business owners and what’s working now?
August Drop in Engagement for Business Pages
In August 2018, the results from this update could now be felt by small business owners. Generally speaking, engagement was down for Business Pages across the entire platform. Some business categories saw over a 50% decrease in interactions on their page. So, how did things develop into 2019, and what type of content is now performing best?
54% Engagement Increase for Links to Content Outside of Facebook
NewsWhip conducted a recent study that shows engagement is making a rebound in 2019, for certain kinds of posted content and the source of that content also matters. To conduct this study, NewsWhip assessed approximately 27 million articles on the web. The study was to show which formats, topics, and publishers saw their posts getting the most interactions and shares on Facebook.
The results of the study were surprising. During the time frame of January to March 10, 2019, NewsWhip discovered that links to articles and web content that doesn’t appear on Facebook’s own native pages or groups, saw a 54% engagement increase over the study performed during the same time period in 2018. The 2017 year outperformed the year 2018 in engagement, during that time period, and the year 2019 has outperformed both the 2017 and 2018 years.
The News Feed update achieved its desired results. People are now engaging more with content links shared by their friends and family over Business Pages. So, what were the effects on Business Pages and what post types are now performing best for small businesses?
What Facebook Post Types are Performing Best for Business Pages?
It is worth mentioning, that when NewsWhip analyzed the performance of Facebook Business Pages during the same time frame, since the News Feed update, there was no noticeable increase or decrease in engagement with Facebook Business Pages content. However, there were some specific types of content that far outperformed others.
Live Video Engagement Decline
At the first mention of the News Feed update, Facebook stated how live videos received almost six times more engagement than prerecorded videos. In essence, Facebook was encouraging Business Pages to focus more on this type of content. However, this was at the time before the algorithm update took effect.
In its recent study, NewsWhip actually found that live videos made up the lowest end of top performing post types. So, what post type performed the best for Business Pages.
Images and Native Video Receive the Highest Interaction for Business Pages
Surprisingly, almost half of the top 10,000 best performing Facebook posts in 2019 (so far), are images. Not far behind, is native videos uploaded to Facebook (not live video). These two forms of content make up the top two. For Business Pages, embedded video fell into last place, having the worse performance of all.
Listed from best performing to worse performing, here are the Facebook post types that performed from best to worse, and what number of these type of posts made up the 10,000 best performing posts of 2019:
- Best Performing is Images, with 4,754 (47.54%) of the top 10,000 posts being images.
- Native Uploaded Video is second place, with 3,922 (39.22%) of the top 10,000 posts being native video.
- Links are in third place, with 1,052 (10.52%) of the top 10,000 posts being links.
- Then Status updates, with only 180 (1.8%) of the top 10,000 posts being status updates.
- Live Video: 74 (less than 1%) of the top 10,000 posts being live video.
- Worse Performing is Embedded Video, with only 18 (less than 1%) of the top 10,000 posts being embedded video.
Above, is the order for the best overall performance, but we will get even more specific below.
The order of the list above remains consistent when we consider what types of content received the most shares. However, it is worth noting that when it comes to comments received, Live Video received the most comments, then Native Uploaded Video, then links, and images falling into last place on comments received.
However, based on the type of content performing the best overall, it would be wise for small business to center the majority of content on their Business Page around images and native uploaded videos. Little to no time should be spent on embedded video or live video, for a big picture strategy.
Looking for more tips on how to build a solid content strategy for your business? Check out our post on how to build an effective small business content strategy and where you should start your journey.
R.M.‘s goal is to attract more sales. Her work is proven, not only with engaging your target audience, but also in SEO performance and higher rankings in Google! 1) Client ApartmentList is ranking #1 in Google out of 2.8million other results using her SEO Article Writing Services. 2) Facebook Ad Copy Engagement: Facebook consistently says that her ad sets are performing better than 90% of other similar ads!
