Get more social media fans and create engagement with the perfect post! Follow these 17 guidelines when you post on social networks.
My recent post, 10 Tips for Better Facebook Status Updates, offered some great ideas for increasing Facebook engagement through crafting better status updates. The folks at MyCleverAgency, a social media consultancy in the U.K., did some research and formulated these 17 guidelines to help you gain the traction you need to jump start your social media engagement.
Best practices for Facebook posts
1. Keep things positive
Being positive breeds engagement and encourages sharing.
2. Provide information
The most appealing updates are ones that offer something, but don’t disclose everything — this increases the likelihood that fans will click.
3. Provide a link
If you’re going to provide a link, use Bit.ly, TInyURL, or another link-shortening service so you can track how many people are clicking through.
4. Include images
Posts with images get the highest amount of engagement on Facebook, so be sure to include one when you can. The perfect size is 800×600.
5. Make your posts mobile-friendly
Use simple imagery that can be easily seen on mobile devices — 70% of your fans read your posts on their phone.
6. Engage with users
Posts aren’t the only activities that grab attention — comments and responses do, too. Engage with people and build relationships through conversation.
7. Be available
Post when the audience is listening, not just when your business is open. This will ensure more user engagement.
See my post, Timing Your Social Media Marketing, to learn more.
Best practices for Twitter posts
1. Call to action
Give a clear call to action so your readers know what you want them to do.
2. Punctuation
Don’t sacrifice grammar because you only have 140 characters.
3. Format
Use questions, facts, and figures to engage your audience and drive retweets.
4. Mentions
Use @ mentions to prompt influencers to engage with you and make sure you respond.
5. Retweet
Retweet relevant content for your audience. Don’t forget to leave 20 characters so people can add content or comments.
Best practices for Pinterest posts
1. No human faces
Images with no human faces are shared 23% more than those with them.
2. Multiple colors
Images with dominant colors — red, dark green, pink — are shared 3x more than images that don’t contain them.
3. Light and color
Images with 50% color saturation are repinned 4x more often than those with 100%, and 10x more than black and white images.
4. Minimal background
Use a compelling background that doesn’t take up more than 40% of your image, otherwise your repins will decrease by 50%.
5. Use red
Red or orange images are repinned twice as often
6. Portrait style
Vertically oriented images perform better than those that are horizontally oriented; the perfect ratios are 2:3 and 4:5.
18 Tips for Optimizing Your Pinterest Images to Improve SEO explains more.
Best practices for Google+ posts
1. Use hashtags
Increase your page’s reach by adding relevant hashtags. Google+ automatically adds hashtags for key/trending topics.
2. Tag brands and people
When brands and people are tagged, they receive notifications from Google+ — this can lead them to engage with your post.
3. Trending topics
Get involved with the “hot topics” to improve visibility and show that your brand is keeping pace with real-time events.
4. Use images
Use full-sized images — 800×600 — to make your posts stand out. Tiny images and thumbnails pale in comparison.
5. Find communities
Find relevant communities and contribute your expertise — your engagement will increase as a result.
This article, Create “Perfect” Posts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+ …, is syndicated from Pamorama | Social Media Marketing Blog and is posted here with permission.
30 thoughts on “The Perfect Post”
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I have been working on Pinterest more lately. I hadn’t heard about the no faces on the pins even though I don’t do it– it makes sense for re-sharing, no one wants their boards cluttered with strangers faces.
Exactly. I love Pinterest. Be sure to connect with me and let me know if you want to pin on any of my boards.
Love all your ideas. I especially like how you listed each idea with only a sentence or two explanation. Some posts on other websites give a bit too much explanation and it’s hard to get through the entire list in the amount of time you have. I was listening to the Pro Blogger Podcast the other day and picked up on perhaps bloggers do this for SEO purposes. Still learning about that :). Thanks!
There is a fine line to watch for. SEO is important but our first priority needs to be our readers.
Posting structure is an essential part of your brand, and you’ve given some nice, clear strategies for getting it right, Elise.
The critical thing, of course, is to make sure you’re posting regularly and consistently.
Doing that with your posting structure in mind, will certainly help your develop a strong base of support.
Thank you for your feedback. You are certainly right that consistency is key. Those that visit your page or follow you on social media will lose interest if there is no consistency.
Great tips, Elise! I have bookmarked this post for future reference, because it will be very helpful when I focus more on social media platforms I’ve only been playing with so far. There’s so much potential there, when it’s done properly!
There really is a great deal of potential. I always suggest to pick one or two and master those before moving on to others.
Hi. So much inoformation to glean from just this one post. Engagement is so important and great tips for the pins too. This is one post that will be referred to over and over again. Thank you.
Thank you. I will be so pleased to see how you put these tips to work for you.
Love quick tips posts, some thought provoking ones in the Pinterest area for me, the colour ones particularly intriguing… I’ll have to remember those ones…
I would include adding images into your Twitter section… if you look down a stream they really jump out, as not everyone uses them, and auto-posts don’t usually post photo’s… so it’s worth doing some manual posts of you have an important post!
Great to see these snappy tips for the 4 main social networks…
Thanks Elise 🙂
Jacs
Jacs, thank you so much for your input. I especially love the Twitter tip.
There are good points for everyone to remember to include in their social media plan. And images are so important since so many people are visual, otherwise it will be dry and boring.
You are certainly correct. Visual learning is what makes Instagram, Pinterest and SnapChat so popular.
Great couple of little articles there Elise on What is a Great post. Publishing on my fan page for Women. Thanks. Kathryn
Thank you so much for the repost.
Hi Elise,
Awesome post! Tons of value and fantastic tips for how to post the perfect post on social media 🙂
Thanks for sharing your valuable tips!
You are so very welcome.
Very good tips,Elise
It is not easy to keep all this in mind,
I especially do not really understand the twitter
tweets and have sometimes trouble because
of the characters..
Thank you for the tips
Erika
You are so welcome. It can be hard for anyone to keep it all straight so just bookmark this post so that you can refer back to it.
great list of tips, all valid in my opinion
I am pleased that you enjoyed. Thanks for visiting.
Great information, I think a lot of people don’t even bother with Grammar on Twitter 🙂
Thanks for sharing.
Andy
OMG… that is so true. 🙂
Hello Elise, Now this post is just filled with value my friend, I love how it was all put together to help make it easy to distinguish between all the different sites. Good Stuff! Thanks for sharing.. Chery :))
That is exactly right. I am looking to make it a bit easier for folks to realize their dreams. Whether in health. life, business or all three.
Hi Elise,
Love the way you show how to do a perfect post by making this short and simple list of what one has to do in order to get that post out there to attract attention.
All of the above works! You have laid it out so great that one can take away each and every point listed here to take actionable steps.
I think this is one perfect post!
-Donna
Donna,
You are awesome. Thank you so much. I do love to demystify things.