Facebook research

tl;dr – we did facebook research, You see more from us if you like/comment/share posts. Linky – cats on roombas.

A few weeks ago, we asked for volunteers to help us do some research regarding our Facebook page.

As background. we post a minimum of seven times a day, at broadly the same times every day (first thing, 9ish, lunchtime, mid afternoon, end of working day, 8ish and just before bed). We try to share things you’ll find interesting and funny as well as what we’re up to and – of course – pictures of our pants in the hope that you’ll go and buy them.

We know that Facebook has all kind of algorithms determining who sees what but we wanted to get some real data from you on what you see and when.

We thought we’d maybe get ten volunteers. We got 33! And so we set about it. Three groups were set up, and we asked each group to do one of the following things

Group 1 – interact with us as normal; note how many posts you saw every day for a week

Group 2 – consciously like/comment and share every single post that we share; note how many posts you saw every day for a week

Group 3 – interact with us as normal and count the number of posts, and then go back to our page at the end of the week and count up how many posts are visible

In the period, we posted just over 60 posts. On average, you see 4 posts from us a day. Four was the lowest number of posts seen, 56 (hello Liz!) was the highest. 

Other interesting things came along though – it seems that the time we post things doesn’t necessarily tally with when they appear in your timelines. And not one of you sees every single post we share – which is good as it means we can worry less about repeating ourselves and boring you! And who knew there were so many Kates, Catherines, Kathryns and other spellings! No other name was so well represented! And what was genuinely very interesting was how much you all took to this challenge – we got graphs back, and tables and times of posts. It was very warming indeed to feel that you wanted to help us. THANK YOU, wonderwomen!

What was really noticeable – even in just a week – was that everyone in group 2 was reporting seeing more posts per day at the end than at the beginning – up to 50% more!  Proof that the facebook ‘give you want you’ve told it you want’ model is working. And so our job is to make our content more engaging, so you see more of it. What would you like to see – is it the behind the scenes stuff, or the pants, or pictures of cats on roombas? (we like cats on roombas)

If you were involved in this and you’ve not yet pinged your findings back it’s never too late – it’s genuinely very interesting reading them! Thanks everyone for taking part!

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