Facebook Inc (FB): The Best Way to Get Engagement

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), on the one hand, raised a few eyebrows when it aggressively went after, and bought, Instagram, the social photo-sharing service, to add to its stable of socially integrated  applications for the social-network platform. There were some who wondered if Facebook was late to the party, since everyone was so sure that  video was going to be the next thing. People love moving pictures and will react and engage more with videos than with photos, some said. Then, a few short months later, Instagram introduced 15-second videos. (We referred to these stories before, here and here.)

Suddenly, there seemed to be an image war on the horizon featuring Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Twitter and video-sharing app Vine, it of the six-second video clips. But it seems that for those brands who want to get maximum engagement on your fan pages on Facebook – and perhaps, if you want more of your friends to comment on your own posts – it seems that video might be a little slower to the game than many might have been anticipating.

Like, maybe Facebook was truly on to something when it bought Instagram in the first place for its original intent.

According to a recent survey by Socialbakers, which looked at the top 10 percent of most engaged posts on about 5,000 brand pages on Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), 93 percent of the most-engaged posts had photos attached, while just 2 percent had videos.

Those posts that were just a status update (text only) had 3 percent of all engagement, while those with a link attached accounted for 2 percent. This survey was taken over a month’s time, from mid-April to mid-May 2013.

This survey result regarding Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) posts showed a dramatic shift in photo engagement from a similar survey that Socialbakers took last summer, in which only 85 percent of the most-engaged posts had photos.