• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, January 9, 2013

According to a new study by HubSpot about the impact on social media engagement using visuals in social content, photos on Facebook Pages received 53% more Likes than the average post, while photo posts attracted 104% more comments than the average post. The study evaluated 8,800 Facebook posts from B2B and B2C companies comparing Likes-per-photo to overall average Likes-per-post.

The report notes that Facebook users are uploading approximately 300 million photos to Facebook per day, up 20% from earlier in 2012. Even usage of Instagram, purchased by Facebook in April of 2012, increased 1,179% in six months. The study seeks to determine if a business, catering to this trend in visual content, have a positive impact on crucial engagement metrics, including Facebook Likes, comments, and link clicks. 

This percentage difference is substantial, emphasizing an opportunity for businesses to use photos and images as a means to increase Likes and comments, and thus EdgeRank. (EdgeRank is Facebook's visibility algorithm based on users' interaction with your Facebook Page content.) Boosts in Likes helps increase EdgeRank, which can then cause a page's content to appear in News Feeds more often, increasing visibility, according to the report.

Photo posts garner more attention from Facebook users, but marketers care more about how their social network usage is affecting specific business goals such as generating website traffic. The study looked at HubSpot's Facebook posts from October 2012 and found that these photo posts received 84% more link clicks than text and link posts. Marketers who are using interesting images to their advantage can increase traffic to their websites with an included link, says the report.

The report suggests that this conclusion might challenge initial theories that using text-only posts could be a better Facebook strategy for businesses, versus the contradicting argument is that Facebook surfaces text-only posts in News Feeds more often than photos. While this study does not discredit that theory, it could prove, says the report, that using photos to generate more Likes and clicks would justify an increased focus on images.

For additional information from HubSpot, please visit here.