An experiment to assess what drives organic Reach on Facebook? Likes, Comments or Shares?
I wrote recently about some comparisons I had drawn between different types of post on Facebook with a view to drawing conclusions about the most effective content types on Facebook.
Continuing on a similar theme I’ve been experimenting this week with two similar posts. One resulted in lots of Shares and Likes but only 1 Comment vs another with lots of Comments (and half the number of Likes and Shares).
Here are the post, they were both classified by Facebook identically (both were Photos – recently downgraded by Facebook in its new variant of the Edgerank algorithm) and both were posted at a similar time of day. The image on the right (with the highest Reach) was posted first. If anything its high success would have driven a higher organic audience for the subsequent post (on the left) yet this was rewarded with lower Reach. Why?
From this (albeit very limited experiment) and previous analysis, my conclusion is that Edgerank values Comments over Shares and Likes despite a competing Edge having significantly higher Virality.
The Virality issue alone causes me to question the logic of Edgerank which is designed to show people content they are most likely to want to see. Surely something that is highly viral should be rewarded with higher organic visibility?
And if you were in any doubt that photos are still in the doghouse in comparison to other content types, look at the reach this link/video post scored with significantly less engagement:
Are these observations you have made too? What do you think of the current algorithm?
