There is a really fascinating study conducted by Mashable on a ‘catch of eye’ test – what people look at when browsing brand pages on Facebook.
For us social media practitioners, knowing what our fans and followers look for is crucial.
From the study:
Content matters. Facebook brand page visitors almost always saw the wall first, and spent more time looking at it than any other element on the page.
The exception: Scantily-clad women. 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.
Profile photos can be the difference between seeing and not seeing a brand. Most brand pages’ profile photos didn’t get a lot of attention. Only 57% of visitors to Coca-Cola’s page, for instance, even saw the bottle of Coke that occupies this prime piece of real estate. Generally, profile photos with faces in them got the most attention. An exception to this rule was Skittles, which had an image of a bag of Skittles in the profile photo spot that 90% of visitors saw.
Photos on the wall get attention. 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.
