What are the implications for posting updates to brand Facebook pages?
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Edge Rank Checker
And the answer is…
“The average Post Lifetime for a Facebook Brand Page Update is 3 hours and 7 minutes"
This nugget is baed on considering that each individual Post has a “lifetime”. A Post is considered dead when the growth in engagement is less than 10% of the largest growth of engagement between hourly snapshots.
This data was sampled for EdgeRankChecker customers for the month of December, 2011 across 500+ Pages and over 30,000 individual Posts. The average Page size was approximately 140,000. Page size was not found to effect this.
Of course averages, are just well, averages. So the study also looked at individual pages, Average Post Lifetimes for individual Pages were also examined: some Pages averaged a Post Lifetime of approximately 10 hours, while other Pages experienced Post Lifetimes under 15 minutes!
Marketing implications of this research
Understanding when a Post stops receiving engagement, is helpful because it allows the brand page admins to plan when to post frequency. This suggests 3 hours as a rule of thumb, but examining your own data on engagement lifetime would give a better idea.
Considering the posts with the longest lifetime, EdgeRank Checker advises that pages with a higher lifetime tend to have higher EdgeRank, so their Posts occupy the News Feed for longer periods of time. Posts that linger longer in the News Feed have more opportunities for Engagement. If the Post continues to receive Engagement, it will continue to thrive, therefore extending the Lifetime.