One of the most important thing for any social media marketing strategy is to find out the best time to post. This is important because you want to get more engagement with your audience, which is happened on the appropriate time.
On the other hand, while the best time to post is definitely crucial, there are some other things for you to keep in mind. Here are seven interesting statistics that you will probably find useful when you are trying to make your page more engaging.
1. Posts that contain photos will get 39% more interaction
Not only do photo posts get more engagement than links, videos or text-based updates, but they also account for 93% of the most engaging posts on Facebook. Photos get 53% more likes, 104% more comments and 84% more click-throughs on links than text-based posts. Plus, self-explanatory photos seem to perform best.
Overall, photo posts get 120% more engagement than the average post, and photo albums actually get 180% more engagement. This was a surprising fact, but it seems that if you have multiple images to share, you’d be better of putting them into a Facebook album than publishing separate photo posts.
2. Shorter posts are better than longer ones
Shorter posts get 23% more interaction, and writing shorter posts isn’t just handy on Twitter. Keeping your posts below 250 characters and you will enjoy 60% more engagement than you might otherwise see. You can even get up to 66% more engagement if you cut it down to less than 80 characters.
Either way, the result seems to be that getting to the point quickly and concisely works best. Perhaps that’s why Facebook fans like photo posts so much?
3. Use emoticons
If you thought emoticons were only for teens, you might want to rethink that idea. Emoticons can make a big difference to your engagement rates. Posts with emoticons will get 33% more comments and they also get shared 33% more often. Even better: they get liked 57% more often than posts without emoticons.
Emoticons tend to add a more human side of you and your communications. It seems like this comes across fairly well with users.
4. Thursday and Friday are the best day to post
The engagement rates for Facebook are 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays. The logical thinking is: “the less people want to be at work, the more they are on Facebook.”
The recent study also looked at different industries, including sports, retail, automotive and healthcare, to see which days worked best in each industry. Although they did vary, most of them sat around the end of the week, from Wednesday-Friday. Apparently no industry has users that are engaged on Mondays or Tuesdays.
5. Ask questions to get more comments
If comments are the kind of interaction you’re after, questions might be your best bet. Average brand’s Facebook fan page will get 100% more comments than standard text-based posts.
The most interesting about this statistic is the fact that there are certain question words that attract more comments, with the most popular being ‘should,’ ‘would,’ ‘which,’ and ‘who.’ Open question words like ‘why’ and ‘how’ which make the user think more to articulate their answer sit at the bottom of this chart.
6. Contest is essential
If you’re chasing down new fans, a contest seems like the most logical way to encourage likes. A report from earlier this year showed that 35% of Facebook fans liked Facebook pages specifically to compete in contests. Contests obviously solicit interaction by asking people to enter. It turns out this can work, as ‘caption this photo’-style contests actually bring in 5.5 times more comments than regular posts. However, contest-related words like ‘winner’, ‘win’, ‘entry’, ‘contest’, ‘enter’ and ‘promotion’ are more likely to engage users.
7. People like coupons, discounts, and freebies
42% of Facebook fans like a page in order to get a discount or coupon. Coupon-based campaigns received the highest engagement rates. Giveaways and sweepstakes came in just behind coupons as highly engaging post types.