If your brand just posted a status on Facebook, don’t waste time waiting to amplify it with an ad buy. If you don’t do so within 24 hours, you will lose a great deal of the engagement and viral impressions that would have been generated by posting earlier.
This is the gist of new research from the cloud marketing technology firm Unified Social. Jeff Widman, the director of research there, recently crunched some numbers and found that posts that were sponsored in the first 24 hours received 2.6 times more viral impressions and 2.7 times more viral engagements than older promoted posts.
EdgeRank looks at story’s momentum to determine the number of people exposed to the post. In other words, it attempts to sense virality and then helps it along. A paid update amplifies that initial impact, making it seem more viral and thus receiving better treatment from EdgeRank.
While it seems like common sense for brands to promote only their freshest posts, Widman said this is often not the case. Such posts are often handled by an outside agency that “doesn’t come back for a couple of days or a week or more,” he said.
However, Widman added that in order to get the most out of EdgeRank, Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, you need to build on a post’s momentum once it hits the first time.
One caveat about Widman’s research: He examined a seemingly very small sample, just three unnamed brands over a one-week period. While Widman agrees that “it’s certainly not billions” of data points, it’s more about the money spent and the impressions than the number of posts. Despite the small sample size, Widman said he stands by the research. “It makes sense intuitively,” he said.
Image: Andreas Ivarsson
