When posting a photo, link or opinion on Facebook, you expect it to have maximum engagement and that people will learn or be entertained from your post. It is so demoralizing to have posted something on Facebook only for it to be bypassed.
Looking at news feeds from other engagements on Facebook, some people have likes and comments in the thousands for their posts. Yours may be in the tens and if you are lucky, they can reach one hundred on a good day. What is the difference between their posts and yours? What makes people read someone else’s post and not yours? Could it be the nature of the post, maybe a picture or words? Could it be the timing? Let’s get into the nitty gritty.
Link post vs comment posts
Often, linked posts garner the highest engagement, sometimes, even more, than picture posts. Comment posts are engaging if someone posts something funny and entertaining but otherwise they tend to get bypassed.
Link posts take advantage of tags from the web page, including information on the page’s title, description, and photos. When you paste a link into the update box on your Facebook page, Facebook pulls this information in automatically and places it in a link format. For example:
Publish at non-peak hours
Wondering why you post never gets likes and comments? You are probably posting it at the wrong time. An average Facebook user has 400-500 Facebook friends give or take. Most do not take time to scroll all the friends’ post and skip right to the interesting ones. Also, when you post during the day, no one might bother looking at their feeds because they are busy working. By the time they get to Facebook, the feed has been replaced by the most recent. Therefore, it is very important to post during non-peak hours.
During the day, companies are busy marketing their content online which means you will be facing competition. People would rather visit Jumia to know about the offers on products than waste their time reading your witty remarks on Facebook.
The best hours to post are between 5Pm – 1Am when people have gone home and are relaxing after a long day at work. Then, post your funny joke to entertain them, or educate them on a trending topic that they missed during the day.
Another point to note is to engage with punctuation marks.
- ‘#’ hashtags help link your posts to other topics that are trending bringing you to the heart of the conversation.
- ‘!’ exclamations pull someone to the conversation in that they create and pull attention to one’s post.
- ‘?’ question help bring dialogue to your conversation making our post more engaging.
Has consistent sharing strategy
Fans become interested in your page because they saw something that they are passionate about and resonate with. You have good content, which is probably why they became fans in the first place. They will want to read your content more and more each day. You don’t want to disappoint them. There is nothing annoying as waiting for months on end for someone to update their page so you can continue reading their content. You may lose your fan base. You don’t want that to happen.
Therefore, have a fixed timetable of how your content will be distributed. This means having consistency. There are ways that Facebook has made being consistent easier for you. You can use the scheduler to post content on a regular and timely basis. TweetDeck and HootSuite also make these tasks easy.
It is short and straight to the point
Post lengths are also a factor to consider when deciding whether a post is good or not. A short post that is concise and straight to the point will attract people to reading your post. Long posts get old and boring fast. Mostly good posts are usually 40 characters or less. Sadly, these are the kind of posts that you will rarely find on Facebook. Always when posting, keep in mind that the 40 characters are the teaser of the actual post. The 40-character teasers should be interesting and seductive. Here is an example:
Hopefully, after those awesome tips, your Facebook posts will have more engagement. Why don’t you try them and tell us what you think?