Study: Brands still overwhelmingly prefer photos on Facebook

Though Facebook has tried to make its link share post format more visual, with bigger images, many marketers still prefer to simply post photos (usually with a link) to their Facebook pages.

A new study by Socialbakers, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer, of Facebook posts in a month by more than 30,000 brands shows that 75 percent of the content posted were photos. Links were the next biggest group, with 10 percent. The reason why? 87 percent of the engagement happens on photos, Socialbakers found among the top 10 percent of posts.

While page admins love posting single photos, only 4 percent of the content uploaded by the brands studied were photo albums. Video was also pretty low, at 4 percent.

Socialbakers also explored the engagement for the top 10 percent of posts, showing that users are more likely to engage with photos than any other type of post.

Socialbakers Social Media Analyst Phillip Ross commented on the findings:

Despite all this, our data does not necessarily imply that a photo post will automatically be among the most engaging on Facebook. It simply reveals a common trait that the best posts feature more frequently than do ordinary posts. In order to take advantage of insights like these, you need to know more than just one metric – you need to know all of them.

Readers: What kind of content performs best for you on Facebook?

Source: Inside Facebook

Study: Brands still overwhelmingly prefer photos on Facebook