At Conversocial, our main aim is to help you understand what drives engagement with your customers on Facebook and Twitter. Our unique engagement metric, IPM (interactions per thousand), gives you a clear picture of user interactions relative to your fan size, and can be compared across different pages at different stages of maturity. Now we have made IPM even easier to learn from.

We've had a look at the average IPM scores for plain-text, video, links, and photo updates, to see what type of content is generally most engaging in social media. The results, taken from over 1,300 pages with more than 45 million fans, are pretty interesting.

Average IPM by Content Type

Photos are usually the most engaging updates, followed by videos, plain text posts, and finally links. Social media users are visual; images in the news feed grab their attention and encourage them to engage with your brand. Links, on the other hand, may get a lot of interest and clicks, helping your relationship with some fans, but taking users away from Facebook or Twitter can lose you the feedback that helps your visibility.

Averages can only tell you so much; your customers are different to those of other brands and as for any other medium, in social platforms your marketing messages must be tailored accordingly. That's why we've improved our post engagement graph within Conversocial. You can now view your 30 day IPM averages by content type, so that you can see what updates your own fans engage with the most.

One of our customers does particularly well with text updates; this could reflect their specific fan base, or just how well they have learnt to tailor posts to get maximum interaction! With our improved engagement metrics, you can track the results from changes to your social media strategy easily.

We're continually working on more ways to help you drive engagement. You can now give us your own ideas at support.conversocial.com, where we would love to hear your Feature Requests.

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