12 Tips for Writing Engaging Facebook Content

I could tell you how it’s the norm for a company to have a Facebook page. I could talk about how hard it is to break through the chaos of messaging in a world that is diverse and multilingual, while using multiple informational mediums at once – but you already know this.

In 2012, Facebook released the statistic that only 16% of your fans were seeing your posts on average, and it’s drastically declined ever since. As you likely know, your fans, those wonderful people who have clicked “Like” on your page… are not seeing your content.

There’s no real formula and each page has a different audience, but these 12 tips will help you optimize those fantastic, social by design concepts for content that you’re brainstorming every day.  

Content 

1. Be relevant to your audience and do not alienate any one group.
2. Align with key holidays, promotions, events, and other marketing tactics for your business.
3. Use a clear brand voice that can identify with the target audience conversationally and is consistent with your other marketing messages.
4. Present solutions to your consumers’ problems. If you don’t know what their problems are - ask.
5. Posts should have less than 205 characters, though Facebook recommends 105 characters or less to avoid the copy being truncated.
6. Include a call to action, such as: Share if…, Let us know…,  What do you think?, Tell us… Share what you think…​

But be sure not to ask people to “Like if…” or something along those lines. Facebook has started to “punishing” brands who are “LIKE hoarding” and put these posts even lower in the algorithm. 

Photos

1. Include an image with every post.
2. Images should be nearly square in proportions and 720px wide x 720px tall to fit well in the newsfeed. In order to have an image expand upon click, include images up to 3,000 x 3,000px.
3. Images should have less than 20% text in order to be “boosted” (promoted), and you can use the Facebook Text Overlay Tool to check your images.
4. Show the diversity of your audience, if posting pictures of people. 

Frequency and Time of Day 

1. Post 1-3 times per day. Test to see how responsive your audience is to multiple posts and measure by watching the number of unlikes and engagement in Facebook Insights.
2. Find out when your audience is most active through tools like Social Bakers, Page Lever, and Unmetric or by testing posts at different times and seeing when the engagement is highest.

There are surely many more, but 12 is a nice number. Add to this list below with your best tips for engaging Facebook posts.