A Review of When and What Colleges Posted on Facebook in 2012

This is the second post in our 4-part series A Look Back at 2012.

In our first post in this series, we shared a list of the most engaging college and university Facebook Pages. In this post, we wanted to dig a little deeper into the data and share further insights we were able to glean from our analysis of more than 230,000 posts.

Best Day of the Week to Post

This has been a consistent finding every time we've run analyses on college and university Facebook Pages. The best days to post seem to be Saturdays and Sundays. Not surprisingly, these are also the days on which college and university Facebook Pages post less frequently (Who wants to worry about posting on their days off?). We believe this is probably a mix of a couple factors:

• More time and opportunities for fans to check Facebook, many workplaces and schools block Facebook
• Weekends are often when major college sporting events occur, especially big-time college football

An Increase in Engagement in the 2nd Half of 2012

We noticed a steady increase in the engagement per post over the second half of 2012. This was mostly due to an increase in the rate of likes and shares per 1,000 fans. This is a trend we'll be keeping an eye on. We don't have a strong rationale for why this growth has occurred, but a few possible explanations (these are just educated guesses): an increase in mobile usage of Facebook, the mandatory shift to Timeline for pages, which occurred in March 2012, or maybe Facebook tweaked its Newsfeed algorithm increasing the exposure of pages.

A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words... Or At Least More Likes and Shares

Photos still hold the top spot for most engaging type of media on Facebook. Photos are liked more and shared more than any other media type. However, status updates generate more comments per 1,000 fans than any other media type (30 percent more than photos and 190 percent more than videos).