Congrats, you’ve decided to join social media to interact with your clients. You opened accounts on the Big Three social sites – Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter – filled out your profiles, imported your contact list, and started building your online networks. But what is your plan for posting?
Here we’ll share a few of the best practices for posting on the three most popular social sites. Once you get started, pay attention to what works best for your personal network and adapt as needed to optimize your impact.
Facebook is geared toward casual content related to client events, lifestyle topics, and personal stories. To maximize your impact on Facebook:
Get Mileage Out of Each Photo. Post photos directly to your newsfeed before adding them to an album. This way, each of your photos gets individual exposure and are more likely to get ‘likes’ and comments than if all the photos were posted at once as an album.
Declutter Your Posts. Remove links from your posts once they populate as a clickable link. You want to catch your reader’s attention with your update, not distract them with a long and unnecessary url.
Use Your Words. The maximum character count for a Facebook post is 60,000, so take advantage of the fact that posts with 80+ words get on average 2x as much engagement as shorter posts.
Know When to Post. Facebook gets the most engagement outside of business hours. After work from 5pm-1am posts see 11% more interaction, and before work from 1am- 8am posts see 29% more interaction.
Show personality! Ensuring your facebook shows some personality and emotion behind your brand ensures that you’re seen as relatable to your audience. Exclamation points garner 2.7x more interactions on average and question marks get 23% more engagement on average. Posts that include emoticons experience a 33% higher share and comment rate and a 57% higher ‘like’ rate. Posts with hashtags get 60% more interactions on average than those without. Use them to link your posts to larger discussions.
Tag Posts. If you’re posting photos, tag the people in each photo. If you’re posting an article by one of your contacts, tag them in the post. Those tagged will be more likely to see your post and like, comment, or share it.
LinkedIn is geared toward business-related content, research, and articles. It’s also one of the best platforms for establishing client leads and is one of the most lucrative platforms in a strictly financial sense.
Share! Images posted get a 98% higher comment rate, and sharing a YouTube video garners a 75% higher share rate. Sharing a link in your post drives 200% more engagement!
Keep it Short. To prevent your posts from getting cut off and to ensure they display correctly, keep the title under 70 characters, and the link description under 250 characters.
Post During Business Hours. Try to post once a workday. According to LinkedIn, publishing 20 posts a month allows you to reach 60% of your audience.
Create and Add Publications. Do you have a compliance-approved presentation or publication? Add it to your LinkedIn profile! Go to Edit Profile and choose “Add publications” or “Add projects” depending on the item you want to add. You can also add blog posts to LinkedIn by going to the main page and clicking “Publish a Post”. Both these methods will allow you to share your expertise, establish your credibility with prospects, and help you be found through LinkedIn searches.
The Twitter community thrives on news and current events. Use Twitter to expand your network — the open nature of the platform is built for interactions with people you may not have a previous relationship with. Take advantage of this.
Shorter is Better. Keep your tweets between 120 and 130 characters. This makes it easy for users to retweet by giving them the space to add “RT @username” at the beginning of their post without having to cut words out of your original post.
Tag Users in Photos. Tag users in your photo instead of using your limited characters to write their twitter handles out. They will be notified of your post or photo upload, increasing the likelihood they will retweet or favorite your comment.
Include Twitter handles for RTs. If you share a piece of content from another brand or user, include their handle in your tweet. This will increase the chance they’ll see it and retweet it to their audience, giving your post more exposure.
Hashtag with Restraint. Tweets with 1 or 2 hashtags receive 21% higher engagement than those with three or more. So don’t overdo it by making #every #word #a #hashtag.
There has also been a lot of research regarding the best times to post on each of these platforms. In general, research suggests weekdays are the best times to post on LinkedIn and weekends are the best times to post on Facebook and Twitter. But even these guidelines vary based on many factors including your target audience’s location and age and the goal of your post. Try posting on different days and different times to see when your audience is most engaged with your posts.
You are now ready to start tailoring your posts to each social platform. Since every audience is unique, pay attention to which of these methods are the most effective for your network and adjust accordingly.