If you’ve seen a typical Facebook Page for a brand or company you know that most posts are pretty generic. They’re either observations of upcoming holidays, events or sales, or they’re links to blog posts or new pages on their website.
Let’s ignore for a moment the Pages that break the unwritten rules of advertising in a Facebook Post and focus on the ones that understand the value formula for driving engagement and interest from their fans. What types of posts are most effective for those Pages?
Here are a few selections and how they can work, no matter how generic they might seem, when properly targeted.
- Blog Post Link – These are common because they can be automated to some degree. If you have a blog, you can install a plugin or widget that will send every post you write to Facebook. They are effective if not done in excess. Sharing your blog posts will drive more visitors to your site, but the headlines need to be enticing and images friendly to a Facebook audience.
- Image with Caption – A single image with a funny or insightful caption is a big hit. In fact, for all but one of our clients, this is the single most effective type of post for driving Likes. You don’t get a lot of comments and click thrus are almost non-existent, but people will “like” your images at record pace if they’re particularly striking.
- Case Study – A case study can be a short story about a client or customer or it can be about how you solved a problem for your own business. Either way, when your audience can learn from that case study, these posts have high comment and click thru rates.
- Event or Sale – These have low engagement rates, low click thru rates, and low return rates, so why do we keep posting them? Because putting one out every week or two makes it that much easier to post one when it really matters and it reminds people every now and then that the Page for which we are posting it has something to sell. We don’t expect sales – it’s about positioning.
- Polls/Questions – If your audience is even marginally involved and responds to posts, you should share questions, polls and other engaging content as much as possible. People are much more likely to respond to these types of posts with an answer than they would for a non-direct post about someone else.
There are more – but these are the ones that we’ve found work best for our clients and that in turn drive a higher Like rate and higher return on investment when people do click through.
Every Page is different of course, so don’t assume these will all work for you just because they’ve worked elsewhere, but if you use them periodically, test results, and then refine your usage, you’ll certainly start to see better results in almost all of your efforts.
