Facebook Photos are a rage.
Everyday millions of photos are uploaded on Facebook with a prayer that friends and followers will ‘Like’ them and hardly few of the prayers are answered.
As the Edgerank suggested earlier, Facebook Photos plays a very important role in the success of any brand’s content strategy.
Everyone wonders –
What makes Facebook Photos ‘Liked’
To answer the question, Jure Leskovec, Stanford doctoral student Justin Cheng, Facebook researchers Lada Adamic and P. Alex Dow, and Cornell University computer scientist Jon Kleinberg are presenting a paper at the International World Wide Web Conference. According to them –
Only 1 in 4000 photos gets more than 500 likes
Heartbreaking!!?? Still more is coming.
Only 1 is 20 photos is shared even once
That explains why many of our photos just go off the radar.
These researchers looked over various ‘cascade’ – a term used to describe photos or videos being shared multiple times. The study was based on analysis of nearly 150,000 Facebook Photos which had been shared for a minimum 5 times.
And the primary analyses revealed that there is always a 50-50% chance at any point in cascade that the shares would double. They analyzed many parameters that included the rate and speed at which photos were shared, and the structure of sharing.
After factoring various parameters, they were able to predict the viral factor of Facebook Photos accurately almost 80% of the time.
Few takeaways:
1. When photos are reposted at multiple networks, it helps in stronger cascade
2. Slow and persistent cascade do not help
3. Speed of sharing was the best element for prediction
4. Structure of cascade which means ‘how a photo is shared’ was the next best predictive element
One of the scientist Jure Leskovec did agree that it’s hard to determine if the cascade can be predicted as they happen quite rarely. He also said that there is not simple trick to ensure that Facebook Photos can go viral giving the example of cat photos which might be liked by certain group of people but not the geekier ones in his group. Understanding your group is the key.
What does this study prove for us?
While we wait for the study to be presented and the tool to be developed, the best we can do is keep sharing great content on Facebook.
Your take??
