How to Write the Best Facebook Posts for Engagement

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The average Facebook news feed contains an average of 1,500 stories from a user’s friends. That’s a lot of noise. How do rise above it and get your Facebook posts noticed? Here are some tips.

 

The Best Facebook Post Is…

Is Part of a Regular Content Publishing Schedule

The guys from AgoraPulse studied over 8,000 Facebook pages to find out how they were performing after Facebook’s drop in organic reach. They found that the pages that were still doing well had these in common:

  • Their content targets people that have a strong passion
  • They have very high quality content
  • They publish frequently
  • They get a lot of shares

This means that their Facebook post is part of a regular publishing schedule. You can’t simply post once every few weeks and expect your posts to do well. It needs to be part of a holistic content strategy.

Is Relevant to Your Target Personas

As we have mentioned before, developing your personas is one of the most critical activities that needs to be done before you begin your social media initiatives. When you create content, you must ensure that it is relevant and entertaining to your target audience.

Is Visual

Facebook is a visual medium so it comes as no surprise that image and video posts do very well. Text-only status updates tend to do quite poorly. With almost no exceptions, you should post images or post with images always.

Your images also should be visually engaging and not bland. Remember that your audience is exposed to thousands of messages a day and your posts must be of a high quality in order to rise above the noise.

Isn’t Always Promotional

Facebook is not the place to be selling all of the time. You need to gain trust and build rapport with your audience over time. Think of it not as a selling platform, but one that aids discovery and engagement.

We typically advise going for a content ratio of 80-20 where only 20% of your content is promotional. We’ll spend the rest of our time creating content that is fun, engaging and entertaining instead.

Has Brief Yet Compelling Copy

The bard said that brevity is the soul of wit and that still rings through today, especially on Facebook.

From our experience, we have found that posts with long copy tend to do quite poorly in terms of both reach and engagement.

Sometimes we get asked “How long should my Facebook posts be?” While there is no hard and fast rule, some studies suggest that you should err on the side of brevity. There is a particular study that claims that Facebook posts with 80 characters or less receive 66% higher engagement, while a BlitzLocal study of 120 billion Facebook impressions puts it between 100 – 119 characters. So, keep it under 120 characters to be safe.

Has a Compelling Headline

When promoting your blog posts on Facebook, your headline is the most important element because it determines if your article gets read.

Companies such as Buzzfeed get their writers to write at least 10 different headlines before posting to ensure that they use the best ones possible. And most of them will split test their headlines. A good headline can mean the difference between 1,000 to 1,000,000 people reading your post.

Also, a Fast Company article claims that the ideal length of a headline is six words. Research shows that people tend to skim the headlines and read only the first and last three words. If you have ever written direct response copy before, you would know that firstly, it’s almost impossible to write an engaging headline that short and secondly, some of the best headlines are much longer. So, instead of worrying too much about this, just make sure that every word counts, especially the first and last three.

Embedded Directly into Facebook (Videos)

Videos that are embedded directly into Facebook get over six times more engagement than if you shared a link from YouTube.

That’s not particularly surprising YouTube embedded videos look this:

YouTube embedded video

What tips do you have for creating the best Facebook post for engagement?

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Ang Lai Imm

Lai Imm is a community manager at CloudRock Sdn Bhd. She frequently writes about social media-related topics.