youlike

Asking Users To “Like” Gets 216% Higher Interaction Rate

author: Kyle date: July 12, 2011

“LIKE if you had a great 4th of July Weekend!”

“Did you have a great 4th of July Weekend? Tell us what you did in the comments!”

We see many Facebook Page admins asking their fans to Like posts and leave comments on posts. Does this elicit greater interaction rates from fans? We analyzed 49,266 Page posts to compare interaction rates for posts containing “Like” calls to action, “comment” calls to action, and those without.

After splitting into the three groups, our sample size was:

  • Contains “comment” - 292
  • Contains “Like”- 361
  • Doesn’t contain “comment” or “Like”- 48,613

People are posting statuses with “comment” and “Like” calls to action, but at low rates. Only 1.3% of status messages we analyzed had a call to action in it.

Next we calculated the avergage interaction rates for the three categories of posts.

  • Contains “comment” - 0.14%
  • Contains “Like”- 0.38%
  • Doesn’t contain “comment” or “Like”- 0.11%

Not surprising we see call to action posts asking users to “Comment” and “Like” have a higher interaction rate when compared to normal text statuses posted (not including photos, links, video, etc.) What is notable is how much interaction is increased by asking users to “Like”.

Asking users to “Like” gets an average of 216% increase in interaction rate >Click to Tweet<

So for Facebook page admins, using a “Like” call to action is definitely an effective way significantly boost your interaction rate.

Math behind the graph

Our data comes from scraping the posts of the top 20,000 Facebook pages. Our sample size was 49,266 status messages from these pages. In the “Contains ‘Like’” category, we only pulled out posts containing the strings ‘LIKE’, “LIKE”, ‘like’, “like”, LIKE, and Like to avoid grammatical usage of the word like (eg. It cuts like butter).

Interaction rate definition

We took  number of Likes and Comments for a post and divided it by the number of Page Likes at the time of publish.

Please note that this is our definition of interaction rate since it slightly differs from Facebook’s definition which is (Likes + Comments)/Impressions.

*This article is part of our Engagement & Interaction white paper. (Download below, it’s free!)

We answer the questions that every Page Admin is asking with definitive answers from scientific analysis.  We analyzed the top 20,000 Facebook Pages to find posting techniques that really work. It is free and quick to download. Get it now!

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If you are a Facebook page admin looking for ways to increase Facebook engagement feel free to reach out to us: http://momentusmedia.com/publisher/index.php/momentus/contactus

cateogories: Analysis, Blog, data, Facebook, Techniques

  • Jiří Šrám
  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=570403904 Erin Howard

    Interesting. I’d also be curious to see what happens if you ask a question in your post but don’t specially ask people to answer in the comments? Presumably some number of those 48,613 comments were actually questions but didn’t use the word “comment” and some were just statements. I know that would be harder to measure, but possibly you could just screen for whether there is a “?” in the post.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=570403904 Erin Howard

    Interesting. I’d also be curious to see what happens if you ask a question in your post but don’t specially ask people to answer in the comments? Presumably some number of those 48,613 comments were actually questions but didn’t use the word “comment” and some were just statements. I know that would be harder to measure, but possibly you could just screen for whether there is a “?” in the post.

  • http://www.allfacebook.com/asking-people-to-like-a-facebook-post-really-works-2011-07 Asking People To Like A Facebook Post Really Works!

    [...] Momentus Media has found that asking for a like gets a 216 percent higher interaction rate than otherwise. [...]

  • Dessie Durham
  • Dessie Durham

    Thank you for posting this, I am an Adminstrator of my Fan page and I would like to ask you to click my Like button, the URL is listed here.  http://www.facebook.com/pages

  • http://momentusmedia.com/ Kyle

    Erin, thank you for your comment.  We are currently working on an post which compares questions (screen for “?”) to all other posts. We hope to release it shortly. Please stay tuned!

  • http://momentusmedia.com/ Kyle

    Erin, thank you for your comment.  We are currently working on an post which compares questions (screen for “?”) to all other posts. We hope to release it shortly. Please stay tuned!

    Update WRT “Questions”: http://momentusmedia.com/blog/?p=914

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/William-Klobucar/1117671664 William Klobucar

    Saw this link on facebook through Katie’s post on my wall
    Good article, thanks for showing how simple it can be to write an article that draws my attention
    and caused me to interact with it/you
    Through this comment
    Bill

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/William-Klobucar/1117671664 William Klobucar

    Saw this link on facebook through Katie’s post on my wall
    Good article, thanks for showing how simple it can be to write an article that draws my attention
    and caused me to interact with it/you
    Through this comment
    Bill

  • http://www.basati.com Basati

    Very well said . Thanks for this article.
    ‘ LIKE ‘ us : http://www.facebook.com/BasatiBuzz

  • http://www.basati.com Basati

    Very well said . Thanks for this article.
    ‘ LIKE ‘ us : http://www.facebook.com/BasatiBuzz

  • http://twitter.com/germandan Daniel Stauber

    Intriguing article. I’m more surprised that the average interaction rate (in particular with your way of calculating it) is apparently 0.11%. Don’t you think this is very high? What is the distribution of fan numbers like in your sample?

    One more question if I may - how did you take into account pages using geo-targeted posts?

    Cheers
    Daniel

  • http://twitter.com/germandan Daniel Stauber

    Intriguing article. I’m more surprised that the average interaction rate (in particular with your way of calculating it) is apparently 0.11%. Don’t you think this is very high? What is the distribution of fan numbers like in your sample?

    One more question if I may - how did you take into account pages using geo-targeted posts?

    Cheers
    Daniel

  • http://momentusmedia.com/ Kyle

    The source or our sample set is of high count fan base Facebook pages. We are constantly updating our tables, so the following is a sample set that is simular to the one from this post. Here are the average distribution numbers:

    >Average of the lowest 10%- 21K
    >Average of the top 10%- 25M

    Geo-targeted posts, that’s a great idea to explore for a future article!

    Thank you for the questions Daniel.

  • http://momentusmedia.com/ Kyle

    The source or our sample set is of high count fan base Facebook pages. We are constantly updating our tables, so the following is a sample set that is simular to the one from this post. Here are the average distribution numbers:

    >Average of the lowest 10%- 21K
    >Average of the top 10%- 25M

    Geo-targeted posts, that’s a great idea to explore for a future article!

    Thank you for the questions Daniel.

  • Sherry Appel

    Ok, so just because someone punches the “like” button, is that truly interaction?  Punching that button takes very little time, almost no thought beyond “gee, I’m a nice person, I’ll ‘like’ this for them….”, and, in the end, what does it mean?  I seems so surface to me — but maybe that’s what Facebook is all about, anyway.  But if I really needed to find out what people are thinking, would this be a very enlightening method?  I’m not sure.  I’d be interested in hearing what people think about this type of “interaction”; how meaningful is it?  What good does it go beside get some big numbers?  Thoughts?  Comments?  Likes?

  • Sherry Appel

    Ok, so just because someone punches the “like” button, is that truly interaction?  Punching that button takes very little time, almost no thought beyond “gee, I’m a nice person, I’ll ‘like’ this for them….”, and, in the end, what does it mean?  I seems so surface to me — but maybe that’s what Facebook is all about, anyway.  But if I really needed to find out what people are thinking, would this be a very enlightening method?  I’m not sure.  I’d be interested in hearing what people think about this type of “interaction”; how meaningful is it?  What good does it go beside get some big numbers?  Thoughts?  Comments?  Likes?

  • http://highimpactdesigner.com/blog/3-facebook-marketing-tips-for-small-businesses/ High Impact Designer » Blog Archive » 3 Facebook Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

    [...] studies have seen drastic increases in interaction rates when they ask users to like or comment. Check out some findings at Momentus Media, they saw an interaction lift of over 200%. Tweet [...]

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