Chart of the Day: Image and Link post contribute to a 20% decrease in engagement

Analysis of 880 million Facebook posts by brands in the last 12 months conducted by Buzzsumo has revealed that the average engagement was relatively steady in 2016. Come January, engagement started falling and didn't stop until June where we see a small increase. The post types that have seen the biggest decline are image and links post, whereas video has been able to remain consistent. There could be many reasons why this decline has been so substantial: The organic reach on Facebook has been falling for years with Facebook pushing brands down the route of paid promotions. The issue with this strategy is that you get lower engagement due to people seeing them as ads rather than interesting content for their favourite pages. So much content. With an average of over 1,000 stories…

Facebook launch 'Watch' a video hub for shows and original video content [Smart Insight Alert]

The amount of video being consumed across Facebook has increased dramatically over the past couple of years. Facebook has reported that the number of videos posted per person increased by users increased by 75% in 2016. Video posts now have a  135% greater organic reach than photo posts, generating around 8 billion video views on average per day. Facebook has seen this need and created a new video platform for its users. 

Facebook has introduced a hub for original video content called 'Watch'. According to Techcrunch, Watch will allow you to view personalized recommendations of live and recorded shows. You will also have access to your own 'Watchlist' where you can subscribe to updates on new episodes of your favorite shows.

…

Facebook will start pushing more adverts out to users due to running out of space in news feeds

Facebook has announced that ads will be pushed out on their messenger platform. Meaning Facebook will be pushing out more ads to its users. Messenger ads have been rolled out because Facebook's chief financial officer, Dave Wehner, admitted that the company was about to hit the limit of how many ads it can get into users' News Feed. Facebook began testing this feature last year with brands in Australia and Thailand, before fully expanding it to businesses globally. According to Techcrunch, later this month, a small percentage of users will start seeing ads in the Messenger app’s home tab. These ads will appear between the threads in your inbox, not in your conversations. By clicking the ad you will be taken to the company’s website or their Messenger chatbot. …

How to get 1,000 emails addresses in 3 weeks with Facebook Groups

I’ve been watching Facebook marketing groups for quite some time. I’m amazed at both the supportiveness of these communities and also the engagement. If you check out Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile, some of his more recent posts such as the first ever Facebook Communities Summit and announcement of Facebook’s quarterly results make it clear they can see the value in these groups and want to develop this area more. This year Facebook introduced some interesting features to groups. Here’s a quick overview: Linking Pages: linking your Facebook page with a group is a big one that many have been waiting for. All you need to do is add the ‘Groups’ tab…

How to use strategic targeting to boost your results from Facebook video ads

In March, I wrote about some of the most effective ways to ensure you create strong, brand-building creative for your Facebook video campaigns. With competition for attention at an all-time high, it’s never been more important to create content that is interesting, relevant and clearly branded to make consumers stop and take notice. The quality of the creative is absolutely essential and an area in which we should continually strive to optimise and improve. However for Facebook the importance of developing brand-building creative is closely followed by the level of rigour you dedicate to how and whom you target: In the second of our short series on how to make an effective Facebook video campaign, I’m going to take a look at some of the best practices for developing…

Chart of the Day: As Facebook hits 2 billion only 6% don't use a mobile device

Thirteen years after its launch, Facebook has now reached the impressive milestone of 2 billion monthly active users. And when you think there are only 7.3 billion people on our beautiful planet that figure becomes even more phenomenal. The fact more than 1 in 4 people in the whole wide world are using Facebook each month really does blow my mind. This got me thinking about how all these people were accessing Facebook. Most people I know use the App on their mobile phones but that's only a small sample of less than scientific data. In today's Chart of the Day, I'm going to look at the Users by Device data available from Facebooks own Audience Insights tool.

Global Facebook Users by Device

Globally 94% of Facebook users are accessing their account via mobile and with 63% using an Android device, which makes…

Original content with ads is set to change the way Facebook advertising works

Thirty-six years ago, MTV broadcast its first music video. The Buggles debuted their song Video Killed the Radio Star (a homage to new technology usurping old).  Four years later the channel promoted another Eighties band, Dire Straits, who sang how in return for the channel selling advertising items like microwave ovens custom kitchens, refrigerators and colour TVs, music videos on MTV rewarded rock stars with “money for nothin' and chicks for free”. Whilst the Buggles’ prediction of video killing radio did not come to fruition, the rise of social media – especially Facebook did manage to decapitate the head of attention time teenagers and young adults allotted to skimming content.  (From three minutes – the average music video length - to under eight seconds of flicking through selfies, emoticons and snappy messages). Now Facebook, which has over 1.9bn monthly…

Facebook launches new tools to make group admins lives a little easier

Facebook has rolled out some great new tools for group admins that will help them manage their groups more effectively. The aim of rolling out theses changes are to help group admins and moderators to save time and increase the amount of meaningful content to ensure the groups are adding value for Facebooks users. Mark Zuckerberg  described his vision of Facebook groups as: There is a real opportunity to connect more of us with groups that will be meaningful social infrastructure in our lives. More than one billion people are active members of Facebook groups. If we can improve our suggestions and help connect one billion people with meaningful communities, that can strengthen our social fabric. At the Facebook Communities Summit in Chicago, it was announced to some of the top group admins of Facebook that they are looking to provide…

Chart of the Day: Facebook's revenue per user increase 10 fold in 5 years

Facebook's drive to monetize itself has seen the social media titan raise its revenue per user from $2 to $19 in just 5 years. In this time Facebook has released many different advertising options for marketers to spend their budgets with. In the early days, we were using the advanced for the time demographic and 'likes' targeting options to serve ads via the news feed & the right-hand side area. But with the introduction more advertising features as well as adding Instagram to the mix, I can only see the gap between TV and Facebook becoming smaller and smaller. Now there are a wide range of ad options for Facebook. Which are: Retargeting - art of advertising to people who have visited your website before Messages - Contacting your audience with short messages on…

Chart of the Day: 47% of the 100,000 most popular sites now contain one or more Facebook technologies, giving Facebook unprecedented access to data and web traffic.

The results of a recent study from SimilarTech shows the scale of Facebook operation beyond its own domain, with insights on the platform's reach and exposure through the use of Facebook technologies, giving Facebook its competitive edge on audience data and referral traffic to its site.

This enormous audience reach has been achieved through the widespread popularity of the company's technologies and plugins such as ‘share buttons’ or ‘comment boxes’ on 3rd party sites which deliver traffic to Facebook and strengthens the presence of the Facebook brand across the web.

The most popular technologies from Facebook being used on the top 100k sites are Facebook Connect, followed by Facebook Social Plugin and Facebook's Like Button. 

…