In a study released today, Edgerank discovered new insights into the value of Facebook comments and likes. Every time a post gets liked, it receives approximately 3.1 clicks. For every comment, a post will receive 14.678 clicks, which is 4.73 times or almost 5 times as many clicks as a like. Edgerank also examined shares and clicks by day of the week, and discovered that Wednesday had both the highest shares and clicks ratios.
Edgerank collected data from a random sampling of 5,500 plus Facebook Pages, analyzing 80,000 posts over the month of October 2011.
Despite this data, Facebook shares are still far more valuable than likes or even comments. Asking a friend to share something can start a viral effect, propelling content through Facebook. Plus, unlike a comment or like, which stays on someone’s wall (or, soon, timeline), a share drops into the Facebook news feed, where there’s a higher chance of more people seeing it.
SearchEngineLand reported the top most shared content of 2011 from data collected by AddThis. MoveOn’s Facebook-focused campaign against big companies and Wall Street (Disclosure: I was the Associate Editor at MoveOn.org when that post was published) and this photo of a dog lying next to the casket of a U.S. Navy Seal who was killed in Afghanistan came out on top. AddThis also notes that users tend to share the most around 9:30am Eastern, and that 75 percent of clicks on a share occur within the first day of sharing. The share action happens very quickly, with most users sharing within two minutes of seeing the content.
