From the archive. First published in March 2017. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
In 2017 we covered a study of 1.4 million status updates promising to reveal what performs best on Facebook pages. Studies like it appear every year, and they are worth reading with a clear head about what they can and cannot show.
What large samples do establish
- Format differences in reach are real and large. Images reach roughly six times as many people as link posts, measured as a share of followers.
- Reach rate falls as a page grows. From around 4.35 percent at 1,000 to 5,000 followers down to 0.50 percent above 100,000. This has held for over a decade.
- Length behaves differently per platform. Facebook Reels perform best at two to three minutes, Instagram at 45 to 60 seconds. That is a genuinely useful, well sampled finding.
- Live video outperforms everything else, by roughly four times against links and six times against images.
What they cannot establish, however large the sample
- Causation. The best known consistency study found accounts posting weekly earned around 450 percent more engagement per post. It is observational. People who post consistently also tend to produce better content and know their audience better.
- Best time to post. The largest analysis covers posts scheduled through one tool, which tells you when marketers schedule rather than when audiences are receptive. It also never publishes the gap between the best and worst slot, which is the only number that would tell you whether it matters.
- Signal weights. No study can measure how much more a share is worth than a like, because only Meta knows and it has never said.
The denominator trap
Here is the thing that makes most of these studies look contradictory. Published engagement rates differ by a factor of about thirty depending on whether they divide by followers or by reach. One study says 0.15 percent, another says 5 percent, and both are measuring the same reality. Always check the denominator before comparing anything to your own numbers.
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