From the archive. First published in January 2016. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
We originally shared a video tutorial offering five ways to improve page engagement. The genre has not changed in a decade, so rather than repeat it, here is each piece of standard advice with what the evidence actually supports.
“Post at the best time”
Real but oversold. The largest analysis, covering over 14 million posts normalised to local time, puts Thursday at 9am as the strongest slot and weekday mornings ahead of afternoons. It never publishes the gap between the best and worst slot, a separate analysis by the same company gives different peak hours, and all of it measures posts scheduled through one tool. Use it as a starting point and spend your effort elsewhere.
“Ask questions to drive comments”
Careful. Genuinely asking for advice or recommendations is explicitly not penalised. Asking for comments in order to harvest engagement is engagement bait, which Meta classifies and demotes, with stricter page level demotions for repeat use.
“Use images, they perform better”
True for reach, weak for engagement. Images reach roughly six times what link posts do as a share of followers. But across formats, engagement rates on Facebook sit within about one percentage point of each other, making it the most format agnostic platform measured.
“Post consistently”
The best supported item on the list. Accounts posting in 20 or more weeks out of 26 earned around 450 percent more engagement per post than those posting in four weeks or fewer, with most of the gain arriving in the first few weeks. It is observational rather than causal, and covers all platforms rather than Facebook specifically, but the direction is solid.
“Post more often”
Weak. The usual advice traces to a study with no published methodology, and the industry has moved the other way: Facebook posting is at a six year low of around three posts per week while engagement rates have stayed flat. Regularity matters, volume does not.
What the list always leaves out
Live video, which measures at roughly four times the interactions of link posts and more than six times images. It is the best performing format on the platform and it appears in almost no engagement tutorial, because it is the only item that requires real effort.
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