Despite the prevalence of Facebook pages, a recent study conducted by Recommend.ly indicates that more than half of them (56 percent, to be exact) have less than 256 fans.
This research is the result a study of some 1.7 million Facebook pages. And that examination netted the following:
- Thirty-one percent of Facebook pages have less than 32 fans.
- Musician/band pages have the highest average of fans per page (12,406). Spa pages have the lowest, with an average of 1,300 fans.
- Sixty-five percent of all page posts are status updates that are unaccompanied by links or media.
- Eighty-two percent of all of the Facebook pages studied have less than five wall posts per month (as illustrated in the Recommend.ly infographic below).
When it comes to growing your Facebook page’s audience, those last two statistics are particularly important. The key to Facebook growth is content. Sure, advertising helps, but if you’re not posting relevant, engaging, timely content to your page on a regular basis, then you’re not giving prospective or current fans any reason to interact with, like or return to your page—and if that’s the case, what’s the point of having a Facebook page?
Even if you regularly post status updates, it’s imperative that you include rich media in your content. Facebook uses an algorithm, EdgeRank, to determine the items that populate an individual’s News Feed. Values are assigned to each status update, story, photo or video, which then determines what will appear in a NewsFeed.
Regardless of the type of Facebook page, regularly posting photos and video will have a greater impact on your EdgeRank. Photos consistently rank as the most powerful and valuable type of content to post, closely followed by videos. Links are at the bottom of the list. That’s not to say that you need to banish status updates that don’t contain media, or never post links again. But keep a close eye on your Facebook content strategy and make sure you’re incorporating different types of content on a regular basis—and that means daily. We recommend that our clients post to their Facebook pages multiple times a day, so if you’re posting infrequently, make a point to change that behavior now.
Are you surprised by Recommend.ly’s findings? What sort of content have you found to be most effective for the Facebook pages you manage?
Oh, and a bit about Recommend.ly … it’s a software platform that’s currently in beta, but which offers daily recommendations to optimize Facebook for your business. We’re not sure what we think about it yet (which, of course, means that you need to take the data above with a grain of salt), but we’re going to fool around with the platform and let you know what we discover.
Image by Denis Dervisevic via Creative Commons
