6kites Facebook Crawler Engagement Insights

The 6kites Facebook Crawler is an analytics application we developed to help our clients get in-depth insights into engagement levels and key influencers on their Facebook Pages. We thought it would be interesting to share some findings with our blog readers.

Facebook Activity Statistics
For a recent project, we crawled Facebook Pages from various industries of differing sizes and make-ups. We collected 112,000 interactions (posts, comments, likes) across 20 Facebook Pages. Here’s how that breaks down:

• 70,517 unique users acted
• 4% of the actions were status posts
• 13% were comments
• 83% were likes

These are interesting ratios supporting the 1:9:90 rule about the proportion of users in a community who are creators, commenters, or lurkers. This rule states that in an online community, 1% of the people create and share content, 9% like this content, and 90% only “lurk” and view this content, but do not participate in the conversation. For our analysis, we change the original concept of a “lurker” to an “active lurker”. An “active lurker” is someone who has viewed the content and taken the extra step to like the content.

Engagement Statistics
Now let’s talk about the nitty-gritty of what companies are actually doing with their communities and the opportunities for brands and community managers.

Across our most recent data set, we found the following proportions of content types:

• 71% status posts (plain text)
• 13% link posts
• 11% photo posts
• 3% video posts

We further drilled down into the amount of interactions resulting from those post types. An interaction is defined as a comment or a like associated with the original post. The interaction ratios we found are, on average:

• 8 interactions (likes and comments) per status (text-only) post
• 47 per link post
• 67 per photo post
• 43 per video post

The Missed Opportunity
Let’s pull all these numbers together and get to the bottom of this:

• Link posts and video posts are reacted to 5.6 times more than status posts but are used less than 15% of the time.
• Photo posts are reacted to 8.5 times more than status posts but are used little more than 10% of the time.

To people who understand the way Facebook engagement works, it’s not an “ah-ha!” that there would be more engagement from the non-text status posts. However, few people know exactly how much more impactful they are. With these ratios in mind, companies have a huge opportunity to drive ROI just by posting in a way that engages your population more effectively.

If you’re interested in us running data for your company, please feel free to contact us at info@6kites.com.