executive
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote the article "Facebook Traffic to Publishers? Up? Down? Huh?" In that article we explored the many studies that look at how publishers are performing on Facebook.
We looked at a study from Parse.ly's that measured referral traffic from Facebook. We looked at SocialFlow, which compares post engagement stats. And we looked at Newswhip, who measures how publisher's URLs perform on Facebook.
Each one of these studies were very interesting, but they were also somewhat inconsistent because of how differently the data is defined and what is actually measured. But this is the reality that we live in today. No single study can give us the full picture. The trick is to look at the patterns across all of the studies, and from that we can start to see an overall picture.
This is what we will do in this article as well, with even more graphs (43 of them to be exact).
After writing the previous article, several people asked me if I could provide Facebook data for different types of posts. For instance, is video really performing so much better than photos? And what about live video?
As it happened, the analytics company EzyInsights, a company that measures just that for publishers, asked me if I wanted to see their data. I said "oh yes!", and we then went through a lengthy process of getting just the data I wanted (I had a lengthy list of things I wanted to see).
Like the other studies, EzyInsights' data looks at engagement for the posts published directly by publishers, and they are not measuring reach or referrals. But it's still very interesting data.
So, let's look at this:
The data I got from EzyInsights looks at the top 10 publishers in the US, UK, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. I wanted to include the Scandinavian countries because it can illustrate to us whether scale has a difference, and what impact it has to be a big US publisher with millions of likes and a small Scandinavian publisher where there are only about five million people living in each country.
We also looked at both news publishers and viral publishers, so that we can see whether there is a difference in engagement between different types of content.
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Baekdal is a magazine for media professionals, focusing on media analysis, trends, patterns, strategy, journalistic focus, and newsroom optimization. Since 2010, it has helped publishers in more than 40 countries, including big and small publishers like Condé Nast, Bonnier, Schibsted, NRC, and others, as well as companies like Google and Microsoft.
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"Thomas Baekdal is one of Scandinavia's most sought-after experts in the digitization of media companies. He has made himself known for his analysis of how digitization has changed the way we consume media."
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