A new study released by social analytics firm Visibli reveals that a Facebook post goes ‘stale’ after about 1 hour and 2o minutes. While this may seem short, it’s at least better than Twitter, where “95% of re-tweets happen in an hour” as reported by AdAge.
Visibli looked at the behavior of 200 million Facebook users — approximately one-third of Facebook’s total membership. By tracking the number of “likes” and “comments” that each post received over time, Visibli determined the ‘resiliency’ of each post. Facebook posts receive:
- 50% of their Likes in the first 1 hour and 20 minutes
- 80% in the first 7 hours
- 95% within 22 hours
AdAge reports that PepsiCo‘s head of digital, Shiv Singh, said this is in keeping with PepsiCo’s research, and there is a “sharp drop-off in engagement with a post after 12 hours.” Mr. Singh, who will be speaking at Realtime NY 11 on June 6, said PepsiCo has also done research on the best days of the week and the best time of day for Facebook messages, but the company remains more focused on the number of impressions, likes, and comments that each post receives rather than how long it ‘lasts’.
Additional highlights from the Visibli report:
- Audi’s Facebook Page has the most engaged fans, beating Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga. Visibli reviewed pages with over 100,000 Likes, and although brands overall performed poorly compared to artists and media organizations, Audi was a significant exception, receiving over 225 Likes (per 100k fans) for each Facebook post.
- On average, artists’ posts receive 92 Likes per post, almost twice the number of Likes for media organizations and brands.
- Media organizations receive 2.5x as many Comments on their Facebook posts as artists, and 5x as many as brands.
- For brands and media organizations, Pages with fewer fans have greater engagement on a per capita basis than Pages with a higher number of fans. As the number of fans on a Page increases, engagement levels decrease.
- The opposite was true for artists: as the number of fans on an artist’s Page increased, fan engagement also increased.
