6 Tips to Maximize the Success of your Facebook Posts

In order to maximize the success of your Facebook posts, it is imperative to develop a sound social media strategy. Strategy means little without successful execution- even a phenomenal social media marketing strategy will be ineffective if it’s not executed in a way that converts your audience into followers and customers.

Facebook is the largest social network in the world and is the focal point of most small and medium-sized businesses. How can you gage if individual posts play an active role in reaching and converting your potential customers? These 6 tips will maximize the success of your Facebook posts and your success on the network.

1) Go Heavy on the Visuals

It’s no surprise to hear that in marketing, visuals matter. The human brain processes visual information more quickly than text-based alternatives and will retain that information more efficiently.

On Facebook, this insight results in tangible benefits. Posts with images receive 2.3 times more engagement than those without, while videos result in the highest engagement rates. If possible, every post you make should have some visual element to it. Even links to your website can be enhanced with images or videos to attract the initial attention you need.

2) Strategically Space Out Your Posts

Post frequency is another crucial element of success on Facebook. Infrequent posting gives you little chance of breaking through your followers’ news feed full of updates from friends and other brands. Over-posting will downgrade you to spam.

Studies show that the ideal post frequency on Facebook is once per day. Twice per day may still work, but engagement rates begin to drop after that. Through Facebook Insights, you can determine exactly when your audience will be online in order to strategically choose your exact posting times.

3) Curate Content

At the end of 2017, the social media experts at Buffer analyzed their top Facebook posts of the year and came to a surprising conclusion: each post consisted of curated content. Posts seemed to perform better when the content came not from Buffer itself, but other brands that were simply shared by the account.

The takeaway is simple: don’t just rely on your own, original content to engage your audience. Instead, find the content they already like, and play off of it. As a result, you will turn your Facebook account into an industry resource that your audience will be glad to follow.

4) Vary Your Post Types

As mentioned above, visual content tends to perform best on Facebook. However, that doesn’t mean every single one of your posts should consist of videos or images. Instead, vary your post types in order to keep your audience interested and engaged.

It makes sense to follow up a video or image post with a related link to your website. When you’ve posted some visual features, you may want to consider a straight text update to change it up. Photo slideshows and albums can also provide alternatives to single images or videos.

5) Keep it Short and Sweet

Attention spans are shortening, especially on social media. If you cannot grab your followers within the first second as they scroll by, you have little chance of engaging or converting them. Instead of treating your Facebook updates like mini-blogs, consider them closer to Tweets instead.

Consider condensing your text to a single, actionable sentence. While you can use up to 63,000 characters in a single update, studies and experts suggest that 40 characters is the sweet spot for maximum engagement. The more you can say in this short time span, you maximize the success of your Facebook posts.

6) Provide Engagement Opportunities

The key to success on Facebook is simple: engage your audience, and EdgeRank will show your future posts to more people. More people means more engagement and website clicks. This leads to a clear takeaway: you need to make sure your audience actively engages with individual posts.

You can achieve that goal through a variety of methods. For instance, ask questions directly to your audience. When you tell a story, ask them to share their own takeaways and experience. Conduct an informal poll, or run a contest based on comments and likes. Encourage individual shares, and watch your engagement rates skyrocket.

Strategy means little without execution, just as execution without strategy will not get you far. Do you have a good balance between both crucial elements of the social media marketing process?

Dapper Goat has helped small and medium-sized businesses like you succeed on social media for years. Our team boasts marketing experience on both the client and network end, and is expertly positioned to help you both improve and execute your strategy for business growth. Contact us to learn more about a potential partnership, and get started in taking your social media marketing efforts to the next level.