In fact Walmart posted 1,034 updates in the first half of the year compared to just 186 from Tiffany & Co. and 472 from Victoria’s Secret, which came in second place overall.

Fans losing interest?

The report shows that there was a decrease in the average number of fan interactions in the first half of 2013, making it the first time that the company posts trend didn’t mirror engagement and volume trends.

In 2011 and 2012, when there was an increase in the number of posts published by retailers the engagement and volume metrics also grew at a positive rate. However in H1 2013 there was an increase in the number of posts the retailers published, but engagement and volume metrics saw the biggest decrease since 2011.

This either indicates that retailers are publishing less appealing content, or that fans are becoming less interesting with interacting with brands on Facebook. This could force brands to become more reliant on paid ads rather than a natural content-driven approach.

Images still most common type of content

Looking at the type of content that’s most common on Facebook, brands are predominately focusing on imagery as 80% of posts now include a photo. In comparison, video only accounts for 3% of brand posts while 10% are status updates.

Overall links are only included in 6% of posts, probably because they tend to be less successful in attracting fan engagement.

The analysis shows that the brands that achieve the most success on Facebook use very few link posts, and in fact Tiffany & Co. didn’t use any at all.

At the other end of the scale, the least successful brands tend to post a lot of links. Rent-A-Center came fiftieth and some 20% of its updates include a link of some sort.