Facebook video has had tremendous growth over the last several months with the implementation of live streaming and other features. A new report from NewsWhip takes a deeper look at the social media platform, explaining how—as video has gotten bigger—links have fallen a bit by the wayside.
The report shows that the total monthly Facebook engagements for top ten publishers that have dropped over the past few months, going from 287 million in July 2015 to 162 million in April 2016. While it’s still a steady number, the drop-off in link engagements has been noticeable, mainly because of how well video has been doing in comparison.
It further noted that the decline wasn’t limited to a singular type of interaction. There was a 55 percent drop in Likes across the top ten sites over the same period, while Shares fell by 57 percent, and comments declined by 64 percent.
Meanwhile, video has picked up quite a bit. The report cited CNN’s interaction on Facebook. Back in July, the company only posted about 22 (2.1 percent) of native videos from its general posts, for a total of 97,330 engagements. However, by the time April 2016 rolled around, it saw significant improvement, with 22.6 percent of its overall posts being native videos, with 2.4 million engagements. That’s a tremendous amount of growth.
“If people are spending more time watching and interacting with videos from the publishers that are posting them, they’ll see more and more. That means there’s less chance of them coming across a link to a story that their friend has liked,” writes Liam Corcoran, Head of Communications at NewsWhip, and author of the report.
While the engagement rate for publishers continues to be on the high side, these numbers could indicate that using video is better at reaching audiences than just a basic link. “As media consumers’ habits change, publishers need to be aware of how their audience is finding their news,” Corcoran states. “Mass distribution in the news feed helps you to reach the right readers, but takes effort and informed insight to make a proper impact.
“Paying attention to your internal analytics and experimentation is key in maintaining a strong connection with the audience.”
