Two weeks after the launch of Facebook’s hybrid news feed, impressions per post dropped -25% while likes and comments are up +9% and +21%, respectively, according to data from an Edgerank study of 3500+ Facebook pages over the time period of 9/3-9/17 and 9/24-10/8. This data remains consistent with the first week’s numbers, which showed that impressions per post were down -33% while likes and comments went up +18% and +17%, respectively.
Why are People Commenting and Liking More Now Than Before?
When a user engages with content by commenting, liking or re-sharing, more people see the content. So if content is highly sharable and engaging, it will pop up in the news feed quickly, whereas un-engaging posts will not. Even if your content is highly sharable, most people will only see it once, says SearchEngineWatch. This is why the hybrid news feed sometimes shows “top news,” but most of the time just shows “recent stories.”
As an experiment this week, I’ve been starting off my mornings by sharing a piece of highly sharable content that I see popping up a lot in my news feed. Here’s what surfaced today:
I check my Facebook multiple times a day, and I never did see that content in my news feed again even though a number of my Facebook friends had commented on it, liked it and shared it. This makes perfect sense, since you’re a lot less likely to like, share or comment on a story that you’ve already seen.
