You can breath a sigh of relief as I promise to keep this quick. The reason for this brief look at 2019 in terms of social media is simply because I have good news to share.
2018 saw a horrendous decline in all aspects, consequently, this post last year was certainly far more analytical as I tried to manage the fallout of what was a pretty aggressive decline on my core social media platform, Facebook. If you’re interested to see what happened back then, you can see the full article here
Growth in 2019
Thankfully though, 2019 saw some growth and the ship began to rise again. So let's look at what happened on my Facebook business page over the last couple of years.
Above you can see the total followers for 2018 compared to 2019. Now granted, follower growth is extremely marginal on Facebook right now and that goes for many people, not just me. Conversely, I can share a picture of my morning cup of coffee on Instagram and get more followers overnight than I can get on my Facebook Page in a month!
The total number of followers is not everything, but for me, it’s the quality of the followers that’s important. I’d take 100 engaged and enthused followers on Facebook over a million bots on Instagram.
Yes, I’m exaggerating, but the point still stands that I prefer the Facebook platform for its ability for me to discuss and communicate with other creatives compared to just getting ‘likes’ or emojis on Instagram. I’m not saying its better, but I am saying it’s what I prefer for my community.
Engagement in 2019
Now let’s look at the actual engagement of those followers. Sure, you can have thousands of fans, but it’s pointless if you’re not posting engaging content.
I’m sure many of you who are here are not confused by these figures, but if you’re new to Facebook, let me explain the significant dissonance between total followers versus ACTUAL people seeing and engaging with anything you post.
So how can a page with well over 20,000 followers only get a 1000 or so people engaging with its content? This is just business along with the fact that people have been leaving Facebook in droves in recent years. So on one hand, if you want all of your followers to see your posts, you have to pay for that privilege. On top of that, there are of course many people who liked my page and then left facebook resulting in that distance between the two figures.
For me, the most important and TRUE figure to look at is ‘post reach’. This is the number of people who actually see your post and thankfully, that number grew nicely. Sure this is not a big number, but remember, people are leaving Facebook in droves so any growth is a significant one compared to many others.
Most Liked Content of 2019
Again, we see a nice bump this year compared to last. Heres the top 10 liked images of 2019.
So at first glance, this looks pretty good. But most importantly for me, these are all consistent numbers. For example I don’t have a number 1 with 1000 likes and number 2 with 150. From 1 to 10, the likes are consistent. What isn’t really shown particularly clearly here though, is that all of these, bar one, are all in the last half of 2019. In fact, the first half of 2019 saw horrendous figures in many of the shots.
To give you a little context, here’s the total number of likes (adding up all likes for all 10 shots) one the past few years.
Total number of combined likes for all Top 10 images in 2015 = 2978
Total number of combined likes for all Top 10 images in 2016 = 2567
Total number of combined likes for all Top 10 images in 2017 = 4297
Total number of combined likes for all Top 10 images in 2018 = 2597
Total number of combined likes for all Top 10 images in 2019 = 3204
Conclusions
By all means, you can interpret the data however you like, but for me, this is positive news. The media has done nothing but tell us that Facebook is dead and that everybody is leaving etc. etc. Although, I’m sure they’re not technically wrong. I mean, I doubt many children are signing up to be a part of the same social media platform as their kids, but it could actually be that many are coming back to Facebook from Instagram.
Of course, counter to all of this speculation, it could just have been that the growth was down to something that I actually did. 2019 saw me really drive my page with more time being spent on it with me ‘Share-a-Shoot’ posts every Monday. In fact, the last part of 2019 saw me actually do live feedback once a month for a couple of hours each time. I introduced prizes and gifts for long time fans of the page and Ive done nothing but encourage interaction and feedback with the community.
So regardless of whether people are ‘coming back’ to Facebook, or if I’m simply creating a more generation engaging community to be a part of, whatever it is, it’s working and I aim to continue it into 2020!
P.S. Of course one possible reason for the community growth in 2019 that wasn’t mentioned in the main body of text could be…. no it’s so unlikely that I wont bother mentioning it….unless….. could it be that I’m producing better photography in 2019 than in 2018?!?!?
Surely better work coudnt’t be the reason for more likes on my images!!!!!
Heretic! Burn the witch!
THANK YOU
Thank you as always for checking out my article and spending a little bit of your day with me here. I know this wasn’t a particular exciting article, so if you made it all the way to the end, you have my respect.
If you have any questions about this one, then feel free to let me know in the comments below. I can’t promise to have all the answers, but I’ll certainly do my best to answer what I can. Thanks again for stopping by.
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