The Psychology of Facebook Page Engagement: Exploring Status Updates

If you are a marketer responsible for the social media function or a sociosumer (social + consumer = A consumer on the social web) trying to get a grip of user behaviour patterns on Facebook then you might consider reading this further.

They say that beyond “Facebook” profiles, the biggest thing to have happened to Facebook has been Brand-pages. Brand-pages have immensely contributed to Facebook’s exponential growth and commercialization.

If we go by research from http://www.facebook.com/BrandGlue, 99.5 % of interactions on page updates are made over user’s wall or newsfeed. This certainly implies that a “wall/newsfeed” is the critical interaction area for a fan-page post.

At the same time we are aware that “Facebook” shows us the “Top News” by default. This means that a page update would only display in a user’s timeline if it has invoked high number of responses. There are users who change the “News Feed” to “Most Recent” but this number is comparatively very low.

So if you are the page-admin, responsible for updating your FB fan page what does it mean for you?

1. If someone has become your page fan due to a friend suggestion and doesn’t recognize your brand, then your post is a window of opportunity to create awareness.
2. Every single word in the post belongs to the brand and reflects the personality of the brand as a whole.

There is a fair chance that over a period of time the post may carry certainly reflections of your thought-process and your
vocabulary but it shouldn’t weigh-down brand’s philosophy.

Any post that you write will generate either of these reactions:

1. Create an impact – An emotion which is reflected in the form of a “Like” or a “Comment”. By default, you can expect more likes to happen due to user-easiness.
2. A neutralized opinion, your reader views the post in his/her timeline and scrolls over to the next post and possibly prefers to read a status update made by his friend.

Look at it from a user’s mindset when he logs on to Facebook to see what his/her friends are up-to and your fan-page post is directly competing with the user’s friend updates. How often do you calculate this perceived value of your wall-post as a fan-page administrator?

Based on experiences, observation and learning, I will try to address some of the example approaches that have resulted in a successful impact towards creating engagement on Facebook pages. As I write this post, Facebook has started rolling out more prominent designs of News Feed filters allowing a user to set filters. While Top News doesn’t seem to be affected, you never know what lies in store 🙂