Posted on: - by Robyn Smith
I came across this study recently and thought it was a really handy bit of information for online marketers and social media marketers who use Facebook.com as part of their marketing strategy.
Tech news site Mashable.com has partnered with visual tracking software specialists EyeTrackShop to conduct a study into how an audience actually looks at a Facebook brand page. It tracked which part of the page audiences are first drawn to, how effective images are, how prominent the wall is, and how users generally navigate around the page.
The Study:
EyeTrackShop used webcam eyetracking to track the eye movements of 30 participants as they looked around some of Facebook’s biggest brand pages including; Coca-Cola, Skittles, Victoria’s Secret, Starbucks, Converse, PlayStation, Pringles and Red Bull.
The heatmap to the right shows a visitor seeing the Coca Cola brand page whilst being tracked by EyeTrackShop’s software. The red spots indicate where attention was held for the longest so at a quick glance we can see that the top of the wall and the top images were popular spots.
The Results:
- The “likes” column was noticed 58% of the time
- The smaller pictures we’re noticed 85% of the time
- Visitors almost always saw the wall first
- Visitors spent more time looking at the wall than any other element on the page
- Profile pictures aren’t as effective as we think – Only 57% of visitors to Coca-Cola’s page looked at their profile image
- Generally, profile photos with faces in them got the most attention
- Pages with photos on the wall generally held attention for the longest – “The Facebook wall with the most images at the time of the test, PlayStation, was also the one that people spent the most time looking at. On average, viewers stayed on the wall for 4.88 seconds. No other page element on any brand’s page held attention for longer than four seconds.”
Exceptions:
The study found that the above results proved accurate with the majority of the Facebook brand pages, with the exception of the Victoria’s Secret page. Mashable say “Victoria Secret’s page was the only one in which people looked at the profile photo – a busty woman in a brassiere – before they noticed the Facebook wall. When they did move on to the wall, they spent about 25% less time looking at it than they did other brands’ walls.”
The Conclusion:
The conclusion is something that all online marketers probably already knew, which is that maintaining an active Facebook brand page with fresh media and content is a good way to keep interest in your page at a high.
Images clearly proved popular with this study and the introduction of the additional images in 2010 (noticed 85% of the time) seems to have given Facebook brand pages a boost in popularity and interaction rates with visitors.
Maintaining an interesting and relevant wall also seems to be an important note to take away from the study (again, something we already knew). However, it is relatively surprising to see that visitors spent most time looking at the wall than any other elements on the page, given the popularity of additional pages/tabs, polls, questionnaires etc that Facebook brand pages can now offer.
Like I said, the conclusion isn’t something that we couldn’t have (or hadn’t already) guessed, however the additional bits of information that the study provides, such as the relatively low attention rate with profile pictures, are the bits that online marketers can take on board to further refine their social media marketing strategy.
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