Facebook have made many changes to the layout of brand pages and what is displayed in news feeds. This has meant that many people are facing a decline in their post’s reach and with the increasing competition to be seen on people’s news feeds understanding how to increase your chances of landing on someone’s news feed is more important than ever. The following are incredibly useful tips and strategies from Search Engine Journal that can help increase your chances of your posts being seen.
1. Scheduling Posts
If you are trying to improve your chances of your posts landing a spot in people’s news feeds try adjusting your scheduling strategy to post during the most effective times. SEJ’s study found that posts are more likely to receive more interactions at weekends than weekdays, with posts on Sundays being 25% more effective than posts on Wednesdays. In addition, whilst posts during the working day (8am – 5pm) are seen as the most popular time to post, posting between 5pm and 1am is more likely to improve the likelihood that people will engage/interact with your post.
2. Using Images
It is widely know that people prefer looking at images than reading text, and SEJ’s study on Facebook posts found that posts with images are likely to receive 37% more interactions than posts without.
3. Using Punctuation in Posts
An oversight in posts is the use of punctuation. Punctuation can help give a post more emotion and can help you connect at a more human level. Most posts on Facebook do not contain an exclamation mark, but the posts that do use them were found to have 2.7 times more engagement on average.
4. Hashtags
Did you know Facebook uses hashtags?
Hashtags on Facebook can help users find news and content on specific topics. However SEJ found that less than 1 in 6 posts they studied contained hashtags, but the posts that had at least one had 60% more engagement!
5. Post length
Out of the posts studied the majority contained less than 20 words. However posts of 80-89 words gained twice as much engagement. This is thought to be because people have invested the time to read the length of the snippet and are intrigued into clicking the “continue reading” link to read more.