I you have been posting in Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus you may have seen an unexplainable phenomena of some posts getting high engagement (meaning ‘shares’, ‘retweets’, ‘likes’, etc) and some posts getting very little. And you may have been subsequently befuddled as your post that got very little engagement was just as good as your post that got high engagement! What is going on here? Well, it is not random. There are several factors that will determine the engagement level of your post. Today let’s look at a few of them so you can boost your post’s effectiveness.
Photos & Video
Possibly the BIGGEST factor in determining the engagement level of your post is whether or not you have VISUAL stimuli! Studies have shown that by having a photo or video can increase engagement as much as 50 percent! This may not be news to some but it clearly shows that EVERY post you make needs to have a visual factor and cannot be just plain text. In addition it need not be a professional or amazing photo or video, it just has to be something that is not text so as to attract the eye.
Ask questions
A very obvious and under-used tactic is to directly reach out to your audience and ask them a question. This works rather well, however if you do it, make sure to respond to the replies people make to the post. This does not have to be limited to banal questions such as: “what is your favorite food”, it can be made more interesting as in the form of quiz questions. People are always ready and willing to express their opinions or display their knowledge.
Timing
Timing is a BIG factor and it will require some testing on your part to find out in your time zone and demographic what hours garnish the highest engagement.
Simply plan out posts for Monday through Friday, (make them as similar as possible) and post them every three hours starting from 7am to 7pm. This will then show you statistically at what time of day your posts do best.
Call to Action
Generally speaking, people won’t do something unless you tell them to. Readers are spectators and typically stay that way unless they are stimulated to do so otherwise. You can’t expect people to ‘like, share, retweet’, etc unless the stimuli for them to do so is considerable. Therefore it is necessary to actually tell people to share the post. How you phrase this is up to you and will require testing in order to find the most ‘penetrating’ phrase which gets them to share.
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