A version of this article was first published on the INMA blog
If you’re suffering from low engagement on Facebook, there might just be a solution. And it’s in your Echobox right now.
Reaching and engaging audiences on social media has become more and more difficult for news publishers over the past year. Meta’s decision to deprioritize news content has had a deeply damaging impact on engagement on both Facebook and Instagram, even in those countries where political content hasn’t been banned altogether.
This is clearly not a tenable position for publishers who are still deeply intertwined with mass distribution through social media. What we’ve seen at Echobox, however, is that necessity is the mother of invention. The seemingly intractable position that publishers find themselves in has led to new waves of experimentation and innovation.
And one such insight from this experimentation is a practice that seemingly exploits a loophole in Facebook’s algorithm and can radically improve impressions and engagement on the platform: incorporating photo posts into your strategy.
A short history of photo posts
Back in 2017, Facebook released new advice to news publishers. It said that mixing link posts (that is, standard posts with clickable images) with photo posts (posts containing an image with a link inserted in the share message) would produce the best results due to recent changes to its algorithm.
We studied 35,000 posts to understand whether this was true and quickly determined that it was not. Our study found the opposite. Not only did mixing link and photo posts have a deleterious effect on everything from impressions to engagement, the higher the proportion of photo posts the worse the performance.
Fast forward to 2024 and we now have some evidence that the reverse seems to hold true: photo posts are producing significantly higher levels of engagement than link posts.
Low engagement on Facebook? Photo posts should be a part of your sharing strategy
Because we analyze hundreds of millions of data points every day, we adapt to the smallest changes in Facebook’s algorithms. From analyzing the shares of thousands of publishers, we began to note something interesting. Some were achieving positive results by sharing photo posts with the link in either the comments or the share message.
So we ran some experiments to evaluate the effect of photo posts on page performance. We took 40,000 link shares over 33 Facebook Pages, randomly converted 25% into photo posts and measured the results.
Our findings were comprehensive. In each case we found that publishers saw increased impressions and engagement after incorporating photo posts into the sharing strategy.
And these increases were, frankly, massive. On average, pages posting photo posts saw an increase in impressions of around 114%, while engagement increased by around 100%. While our study wasn’t large enough to exclude the possibility of regional variations, the size of the increase would lead us to believe that these increases are happening across the board.
The effect on traffic was a little more mixed, although it was broadly positive for the majority of pages. There were some declines in traffic, but on the whole we saw a general increase in pageviews.
Why are photo posts outperforming link posts?
Why the sudden over-performance of photo posts relative to link posts? We think that by throttling link shares, Facebook tries to keep users on its site for longer and maximize advertising income. Including the link elsewhere in the post seems to exploit a loophole in Facebook’s algorithm and avoid deprioritization.
Whatever the reason, for now this seems to be a very effective tool to increase publishers’ performance on Facebook, which remains their largest driver of referral traffic from social media.
How can I beat low engagement on Facebook with Echobox?
We’re always looking for new ways in which our products can benefit publishers. So we’ve taken these insights and baked them into Echobox Social.
You can change your performance goal to focus on engagement in the Property section of the settings menu.
By switching your performance goal to engagement, Echobox will automatically convert a portion of your shares into image posts with a link in the comments or share message, allowing you to boost your engagement with no extra effort.
