Thanks to her hardwork, Anna, our Data Analyst, keeps going on the analysis of social networks’ conversations to give you the lifespan of the different type of publications. Today, it’s Facebook!

Following our previous study of the Facebook/Instagram/Twitter’s publications lifespan, we’ve noticed that the different types of Facebook’s posts  (image, video, links, status) lifespan differ from each other.

Anna, based her study on a sample of 20,000 Facebook posts, offers you to show her results:

“As you can see the first chart above a Facebook post including text has an average lifespan of 11 hours 04 minutes, and 12 hours 32 minutes if the Community Manager includes a link. More interesting, the average lifespan of a Facebook post is much longer if it includes a photo or a video, that is to say respectively 17 hours 07 minutes and 19 hours 53 minutes.

Furthermore, I wanted to represent, on the second chart, the “still alive” posts percentage as a function of the elapsed time. The number of posts still alive at the moment M is the number of posts which haven’t reached 90% of their interactions at that moment.
The graphic above shows the “still alive” posts percentage according to their type. The major behavior difference between these different types is clearly visible on that graph; the curves underneath each other, from the bottom up: the text-post (in brown), the link-post (in green), then the photo-post (in blue) and video-post (in pink) curves.
So the percentage of still alive posts including only text at a moment M is always lower than the one corresponding to posts including a link, which is itself lower than for posts including a photo, still lower than for posts including a video. Maybe more meaningful, half of text posts die after 5 hours, half of link posts after 8 hours 28 minutes, photo posts after 12 hours 14 minutes and video after 16 hours 10 minutes.

In conclusion, it confirms what most of the Community Managers notice in their everyday work: adding a photo or a video to your Facebook post should greatly extend its lifespan.”

In the next months, we should be able to redo the study and monitor the eveolution of the link-post as Facebook recommends its use in the latest news.

Find all our results right here :

PS : Do not forget that the Publisher tool of Over-Graph gives you the possibility to create all kinds of Facebook posts and recommends you to publish your content at the best moments.