Social Media Experiment

The Idea

• I watched a video on a website get10000fans.com called Weird “Link Placement” Trick GeneratesUp To 312% More Clicks.

• The people from get10000fans.com conducted an experiment for 90 days, putting links that they posted on Facebook in the comments section rather in the actual post. They found that they reached more people with their posts this way.

The Experiment

• Hypothesis: Inserting Links into the Comment section rather than the post will result in further reach and more likes and comments.

Procedure

• For a week during my Rowperfect Facebook daily posts I will post my links in the comments section rather than the actual post.

• I will continue the rest of my Rowperfect Facebook activity as usual as a control to make sure I am getting the usual amount of reach and likes on the rest of my posts.

Current Posts

I currently make three main types of posts on Facebook

• Linked posts that I have put up e.g. an article or video.• Non-linked posts that I have put up e.g. a photo I have

posted• Posts that we have shared from another Facebook user

e.g. a photo they have posted

Using Facebook Insights I will assess three different factors.

1. The number likes, comments and shares. 2. The post reach.3. The number of clicks. I will use these factors to compare the different types of posts from previous weeks and from the experiment week.

Post averages from experiment week

Results

From this table we can see that the links we posted in the comments and the links we posted normally have similar numbers of likes, comments and shares and also post clicks. They also differ by only 100 reach. This suggests that posting links in the comments does not make too much of a difference. This experiment was only conducted for a week, where the one this is based on took 90 days.

Types of Posts Likes, comments and shares

Post Clicks Reach

Link in Comments 5 31.4 540.6

Posted Links 5.66 39.33 440

Non-links Shared 40.75 116.75 695.25

Previous Weeks Averages

If you remember from the last slide for the experiment week the non-links shared had by far the biggest reach, clicks and likes comments and shares, where previously it has had the worst. The numbers for the posted links are dramatically different also. This seems to suggest that there is no right way to post on Facebook. You don’t know if a link that you post is going to generate interest until it is posted.

Types of Posts Likes, comments and shares

Post Clicks Reach

Posts without links 39.8 77.8 604.2

Posted Links 32.8 174.2 1355

Non-links Shared 11.2 78.2 300.2

Examples of my posts

This a post from the experiment week with the link in the comments. This post received the furthest reach from all the links I posted in the comments. From this you can see that this post generated a descent amount of reach and post clicks, but only 14 actual link clicks and only 7 likes.

This is the best link posted from the week before by experiment week. This has much higher reach and higher post clicks but the same number of likes, comments and shares. This shows that even with higher reach you still wont be guaranteed to get more interaction on your post.

This Picture is of the shared post during experiment week with the largest reach. This has a similar reach to the last photo but has a significantly higher level of interaction with 70 likes, comments and shares compared to 7. One of these posts is a picture and one a link so the differences in interaction could be that pictures generate more interaction as they are easier and faster to interact with.

I thought it was interesting that by getting more reach, posts didn’t necessarily generate more interaction so I had a look at a few more of my posts.

This post has very low reach but a high number of likes compared to the reach.

This post has double the reach but less than half the likes. It is also one of the posts with the links in the comments that is supposed to generate more reach and interaction.

This final post is one that I shared during experiment week. It has low reach but an extraordinary high click rate and 19 likes which is also very high. It almost seems like there is no relationship between the reach and likes and post clicks that a post will achieve.

Conclusion• The main finding is that from the data I have collected it is the quality of the

post rather than whether the link is in the comments section or if it is a photo or a shared post etc.

• During the experiment I found it impractical to put the links in the comments section as Facebook doesn’t let you schedule comments so I would have to schedule the post and then set an alarm and come back and put in the link before too many people have seen the post. This can be problematic if you don’t have your laptop with you at the time of the post or if the post is scheduled for the middle of the night.

• I only conducted this experiment for a week compared to 90 days and this could explain why my results are so different from the initial experiment from get10000fans.com. But something I did notice from the video was that they were achieving reach but not getting high levels of interaction.