Disruptive Conversations

Would you like to have more Likes or Comments on items you post on Facebook? Perhaps for your company's (or client's) Facebook Page? It seems one tip is to make sure you include a photo.

It's perhaps a bit of a "DUH!" thing, but a gent named Max Woolf just provided some data to back up that idea. He downloaded all of Robert Scoble's Facebook posts (via Facebook's API) and then analyzed the data. The graph shows the trend quite clearly (click on the image to see the full version):

In every quarter but one, posts with a photo had a higher average number of likes and in most quarters had more comments than posts without a photo.

Now, granted, this is data for a single person's feed, but Robert Scoble creates a large number of posts and has a great number of friends and subscribers. (Max Woolf provides a link to the source data for those who want to play with the numbers.) It also just seems to make sense to me given my own usage of Facebook. My eye is naturally drawn to links or posts that have photos more than necessarily to plain blocks of text.

In the comments to Robert Scoble's sharing of the data, Max Woolf indicated that he performed a similar analysis on the TechCrunch Facebook Page and came up with a similar result.

It will be interesting to see if someone else does a bit more exploration of this topic to see how it goes with a larger sample size, but I'll expect the trend to be similar. Part of the strength of Facebook's new design is its emphasis on visual display... helping highlight the photos and images on your Timeline. There's really no surprise that photos will attract more likes and comments.

But it's always great to see some data... :-)

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