Posting to social media can be an art. Creating great content for your business profile page to keep your audience  active is just the beginning. Knowing what to include (images, videos, or links), when to post, and more can get confusing. Here are a few tips.

Use images or videos to catch your audience’s attention

People’s newsfeeds are getting more and more crowded every day. Using an image or video will catch people’s attention. While images and videos account for the majority of what you see on Facebook, you can create eye catching images to stand out. Programs like Canva help non-designers create images easily. If you don’t have any images of your own to use, you can find royalty-free images or use stock photography.

Keep posts short

The average adult attention span is only 8 seconds. When you add everything else that gets our attention on a daily basis, it is easy to get distracted. Keeping your post short will help to ensure that your audience’s attention is held. When people are scanning through social media, on average, people will read the first few words in your post. Choosing your words carefully and keeping it short is key.

Use links

When you have something that you want share, a link is the best way to do this. Facebook has found that people prefer to clink links rather than a link in a caption of a photo. Links are great for curated content where you want to give the credit to the author. Links are also a great way to post your own content that may have gotten a bit long. If you are using a link that is short, great. If not using a link shortener like Google URL Shortener  is a great way to have a link, but not have it take over your post. (Google URL Shortener also keeps track of your clicks)

Hashtags

Hashtags can help drive traffic to your page and can help measure success. (For those who don’t know hashtags are a word or phrase preceded by a hash mark (#)) Hashtags are more common on Twitter and Instagram, but you can use them on Facebook too. Be careful how many hashtags you use as too many can turn people off. On Instagram, more hashtags are better, the optimal number for interactions is 9-12. For Facebook and Twitter, less is more, posts with 1-2 hashtags average more interactions. But be careful, not everything needs a hashtag and make sure your hashtags are relevant to what you are posting.

When to Post

There are many articles on the best time to post to different medias and no one agrees. In general most agree that posting too early in the morning and too late at night, your posts will not get interaction. What many have found is that you need to look at more factors than the best time. These factors include industry, location, who your followers are and when they are online, which platform you are using, and much more.  The best way to know when to post is to post at a few different times and then look at when you get the most interaction.  Tools like Facebook Insights are great at finding when your posts have the most interaction. Facebook Insights also just started giving pages information on when your audience is online.

Scheduling and Backdating Posts

Sometimes you will want a post to come out at a specific time.  Facebook has long given the option to schedule posts. Twitter just recently added the option to schedule tweets. There are also programs available to schedule posts to multiple social media accounts, Buffer and Hootsuite are examples. Facebook gives you an option to backdate posts.  This feature is most helpful when you are setting up an account and are wanting to have some posts before the page goes live.

Consistency is Key

One of the worst things you can do is to post a bunch of updates within a few minutes and then not post again for weeks.  Customers and the algorithms that generate newsfeeds notice when there is too much activity or no activity on a page. Consistent posting will give you the best rating with social algorithms.  Consistent posting will also give your customer the knowledge that your organization is active and engaged.

Responding is Key

Responding to your customers is also very important.  This includes but is not limited to responding to comments (positive and negative), solving customer service concerns, answering questions and noticing their engagement. When you have both active responses and consistent posting, it strengthens the view that your organizations is active and engaged.  

Posting to social media may seem overwhelming, but knowing a few tips can help give you the confidence to know what and how to post.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to me at Lisa@LisaSchickertSmith.com