Why Yoshitha Rajapakshe on FB SLmemes page is so significant?

Whole Sri Lankan online community was talking about one thing yesterday. President's son and his girl friend commenting on a meme in Sri Lankan Memes Facebook page about them.

The meme was about an astrologist predicting the president that his about to become a grandfather, MR saying his kids dont even have girlfriends & then showing pics of Yoshitha,his girlfriend, some baby. Its a superb meme anyways. (If anyone wants to see the meme,pls comment below i will send the link)

Within few minutes President's sons girlfriend has commented phrasing the meme (in the meme language), followed by Presidnets son himself commenting saying "HILARIOUS". This was a first time that we noticed a highlevel VIP personally commenting on a public forum. Both of them commented in a very light way, showing the PR qualities of the President.

This isn't something that we have seen in Sri Lanka so far. But is a common phenomenon in other matured internet markets like India or even US where celebrities & VIPs comment, tweet like normal people in the communities. I assume one of the reasons why India has a huge followership in Twitter than Sri Lanka is because their celebrities are actively on Twitter. I know certain Sri Lankan girls who have joined twitter,just to follow their bollywood celebrities in India and some of them have even got replies from the likes of Shah Rukh Khan on Twitter (Do you see the pas coming out? #IfYouKnowWhatIMeanMeme)

This kind of celebrity/VIP participation on social networks can lead to increase in community members for Sri Lanka - my point is that after hearing the news

• More people will want to join Facebook and 
• More people will want to be active on this pages to interact with their celebrities
• Will encourage more celebrities/VIPs to come on board social media and interact with their fans

for e.g.Increase in Facebook and specially an increase in Twitter users since celebrities in Twitter are easily reached than in Facebook.  Such an increase would mean better internet atmosphere with much more local content around the web. Will Yoshitha commenting on Facebook meme be the turning point of Sri Lankan celebrities/VIPs in social communities?

Next up : "Cold war between popular Sri Lankan Facebook 'share' pages"

Is engagement higher for Facebook photos?

I was so curious about this after my only text status update today morning only drew 9-10 likes. Whereas one of the photos i uploaded got 200+ likes few days back. I gave some serious research in to what gets more activity on Facebook.

Here's data i extracted from three different studies done by three digital marketing agencies.

Type/Study	Web Liquid	Momentus Media	Jon Loomer Digital
Photos	0.37%	0.21%	0.76%
Text only	0.21%	0.09%	0.29%
Videos	0.31%	0.11%	0.30%
Link	0.15%	0.07%	0.35%

As clearly shown, photos gets more attention. But

what can be the possible reasons for this?

Facebook timeline
FB timeline gives more prominence to photos because of its boxy layout.

Facebook share button/link
As i predicted in October 2011, after making the "SHARE" link prominent Facebook images became very popular. Viral image formats like memes became massive trends. Viral groups like "Kajuwaththa Eksath" became a hit among FB users.




Increasing internet usage(speeds&data)
Specially in countries like Sri Lanka,those who surfed Facebook through mobiles are now getting in to high speed connections. Only text status updates were popular during those days but now everyone can afford data for images and its faster.

How will it effect me?

Individual users - Think before you update your status,If you have resources & time,get in to a photo update. 

Brands - More emphasis on photos & other interesting content is needed. Brands should focus on giving a graphical picture of all they want to communicate on Facebook.

What do you think? Do you think Facebook will try to do something to save text only status update because micro blogging services like Twitter will build upon this advantage?