In 2004 Facebook reached 1 million users. By the end of 2012, Facebook had more than 1 billion monthly active users.
As the social media platform has grown, so too have the number of businesses on the site. After exploring proven tips for increasing engagement on Twitter last week, it’s time to look at strategies that increase engagement on Facebook, another social media giant.
When Facebook rolled out a redesign dubbed “the timeline” a while back, Buddy Media (a Salesforce company) decided to conduct a study to determine if markers should tweak their posting strategies. After two months of collecting data from more than 18,000 pages, they reported their findings.
Try the following proven effective strategies to increase audience engagement on Facebook:
- Use photos. People are drawn to graphics.
- Experiment with emoticons in your post. They proved to have a higher interaction rate as well.
- Keep your posts short – super short. The ideal rate is 80 characters (shorter than an ideal tweet!).
- For calls to action, avoid these words: take, click, submit, check, and shop. Instead, try words such as: like, caption this, share, yes or no, and thumbs up.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for your audience to share or like your post or picture.
- Avoid using link shorteners like bit.ly when you post a URL. The study showed that readers preferred to see the end destination.
- If you include a question, put it at the end of the post.
- Try a “fill in the blank” post if you’re stumped. They received four times as many comments as those without.
For the full report, visit Salesforce Buddy Media’s website.
Two parting tidbits:
- There are no hard and fast rules in social media. What works for a competitor may not work for you.
- Always experiment. Social media platforms are constantly evolving as is audience behavior. The latest example? Facebook announced it was implementing another redesign earlier this month.
If you’re a visual person, check out LinchpinSEO’s infographic that illustrates the results from Buddy Media’s study.
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