By Emma Fitzpatrick
The banks with the largest followings or highest engagement on social aren’t succeeding by chance. Their marketers know exactly what they’re doing.
By monitoring and mining social analytics, you can determine what content resonates most with your audience. While it’s always a best practice to analyze trends unique to your following, it takes time to unearth those insights.
Luckily, small changes in how you craft your social messages can also make a significant impact. Below, learn new tricks and tips to optimize the effectiveness of your social media content on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Facebook.
Note: Facebook graphs and insights are from Quicksprout’s 2016 analysis of more than 1 billion Facebook posts.
Say it in 10 words or less. Posts under 50 characters get the most interactions. In fact, engagement continues to drop as you add more characters. Keep your Facebook posts as short as you possibly can. Then, link to the rest.
Stick with what works. Looking for more engagement on your posts? Ask a question and include an image or video. This post type has the highest average number of interactions. To spice it up, work other successful content types into your editorial calendar (listed in order of effectiveness), such as questions, images, videos, links, giveaways and coupons.
Share more Instagram photos. When you post images on Facebook from Instagram, they get 23% more engagement. While it may seem counterintuitive to share the same content on multiple platforms, the data shows it works better than uploading images directly to Facebook.
Avoid hashtags. While you can add hashtags to Facebook posts, they actually hurt your engagement. Posts without hashtags received 34% more interactions. On Facebook, the hashtag feature isn’t native or intuitive. Instead, it seems to add to the noise.
Use the right kind of video. On Facebook, video trumps all. There is a caveat to this, though. Don’t post a YouTube link. The video won’t auto play, and users must leave Facebook to watch it. Data proves they don’t follow through. Instead, embed YouTube videos, or upload the raw video to Facebook for more shares, likes and comments.
Twitter.
Create customer advocates by responding to tweets. Monitoring and responding to customer tweets no doubt takes time. But, as more customers look to Twitter and other social networks for customer service, it’s time well spent. When you respond to customer service-related tweets, consumers are 44% more likely to share their experience and 30% more likely to recommend your brand.
Source: 2016 Twitter study on customer care
Post early in the morning for more clicks. Tweets published between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m. garner the most clicks, on average. If your focus is B2B, posts during the weekdays get 14% more engagement, found Argyle Social. If you’re B2C, post on the weekends for 17% more engagement.
Source: 2016 Buffer Social study on the best time to tweet
Count the characters. If your tweet includes an image, keep your copy between 20 and 40 characters. You’ll get 58% more engagement than longer tweets. If you don’t have a picture, you have more wiggle room! Then, tweets between 120 and 140 get 77% more engagement than shorter tweets.
Source: 2015 The Next Web analysis of 1 million tweets
Instagram.
Think blue. Images with blue as the dominant color get 24% more likes than those that are red. Speaking of which, it’s better to have one dominant color rather than multiple colors competing. Those single-color images get 17% more likes.
Source: 2014 study by Curalate on Instagram image qualities and likes
Find the filter. Filters that add warm temperatures, higher contrast and increased exposure increase views and comments. But upping the saturation doesn’t help, and filters that create a vintage effect result in fewer comments. When picking an Instagram filter, your best choices are Mayfair, Rise, Ludwig, Lo-fi, Valencia, Hefe and Nashville.
Source: 2015 study by Yahoo Labs and Georgia Tech on photo filters and engagement
Energize with emojis. On Instagram, the picture says it all. That’s why emojis work so well on this platform. On your captions, include the heart, sparkle, painting pallet, music notes or raising hands emoji for more engagement.
Source: 2015 Instagram Industry Report by Simply Measured
Emma Fitzpatrick is a Philly-based freelance writer and marketer, whose specialties include content marketing, social marketing and short, snappy writing. Pick her brain at [email protected].
Online training in digital, mobile and social media from ABA.
