With the Facebook News Feed update, brands and publishers are questioning their content strategies and benchmarking against competitors to understand how the changes will impact their reach and engagement.
‘Meaningful social interactions’ is the phrase Facebook have used to determine which content will be prioritized. The algorithm is determining content with comments is more meaningful than content which is shared or liked. Interestingly, Facebook will not only look at the number of comments a particular post elicits, it will look at the character length. Longer comments will drive higher priority.
We examined leading Australian brands on Facebook, looking for insights on how the algorithm has already impacted them, or will potentially impact.
Domino’s Australia, 75% of posts are organic, comments represent 52% of interactions. Focusing specifically on comments, top 10 native videos in the past 30 days resulted in average interactions per post of 1,171, photos, 729. Both types of content not only generate a lot of comments, but typically long contents. However, these comments are frequently negative / flaming – are these meaningful interactions? At least the content is relevant to the brand to the product being sold.
Less can be said for Showpo, a significant social media following, publishing content on average of 15 times a day, mainly photos and videos. Content published has little to do with what they are selling, although the type of content published has most likely become the brand.
Showpo typically promotes about 10% of their content, the ten most commented videos received on average 18,200 comments each, comments tend to be very short, often tagging friends. As the Facebook algorithm improves one could ask, will Showpo retain favor, or content they are posting, as it stands be considered meaningless due to irrelevancy to the products being sold and comment volume being short. Time will tell.
An Australian favorite, NRL. A loyal and very opinionated fan base. After all, we would all make the best coaches and ref’s in the world. Far higher interactions than Domino’s, a lot less than Showpo.
Comments as a % of interactions is a lot lower at 18%, average comments for their ten most commented posts is only 2,139. However, a greater number of these comments are written with passion, conviction and very community driven.
Brands are possibly concerned about the changes in the Facebook algorithm, ‘meaningful social interactions’ is still open to interpretation and a lot of machine learning is required to get it how Facebook are predicting.
By Socialbakers VP Charles Tidswell