With competition high, and so many other social channels and brands competing for airtime, you’ve got to stay on top of the game to stand out.
Marketers, understandably, often struggle when creating posts for social media. Each social channel has its own best practices and procedures, making the post creation process somewhat challenging. It’s not only the content you post that matters, it’s also how you post, that will play a significant part in the success of your social activities.
To help you understand the best practices of each social channel and what to pay attention to when composing your posts, we have consolidated our experiences into a cheat sheet. It contains detailed information and tips, as well as the most important elements of a post on all main social media channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Xing).
You can download the The Perfect Social Media Post cheat sheet on the bottom right of this page or visit our Digital Marketing Toolbox page.
The most important elements for any Facebook post are:
- Provide valuable information: People engage more with posts that provide information they find valuable
- Provide a link: Share links to your website to increase traffic from Facebook. Use bit.ly or goo.gl to track clicks from your page
- Include a photo: Facebook posts with photos receive the highest engagement. The perfect photo size on Facebook is 800x600
- Engage with your community: When companies engage and respond to customer service requests via social media, those customers end up spending 20–40% more with the company
- Think mobile: 78% of users in the U.S. access Facebook with a mobile device. All of your posts must be optimized for a mobile platform
The most important elements for any LinkedIn post are:
- Headline: Craft a headline such that it acts as a mini value proposition using verbs and other active language
- Keep link descriptions under 250 characters: Similar to the link title limitations, the description associated with your status update is given 250 characters before it's cut off with an ellipsis, so shorten your meta description to properly display on LinkedIn
- Share links for engagement: According to QuickSprout, including a link in your LinkedIn posts drives 200% more engagement
- Post images to get more comments: Posting images results in a 98% higher comment rate
- Post videos to get more shares: Linking to YouTube videos results in a 75% higher share rate
- Publish a new status update about once a day: Publishing 20 posts per month allows you to reach 60% of your audience
- Convert page fans with offers: LinkedIn is 277% more effective for lead generation than Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn users are more welcoming to lead gen content—as long as the content is truly valuable to their success
- Send LinkedIn Announcements: LinkedIn announcements can serve as a powerful tool in increasing your LinkedIn lead generation
The most important elements for any Twitter post are:
- Perfect tweet length: Keep your tweets less than 140 characters to leave space for people to RT
- Grammar: Don't sacrifice grammar and punctuation because of character length. Good writing reflects positively on you/your business and helps retain your audience
- Call to action: Make it clear what you want your followers to do after they read your post
- Mentions: Mention brands and/or persons relevant to your content to increase the audience your post reaches
- Retweet: RT interesting content to further engage with your followers
- Add images and video: Images and video on Twitter increase CTR (click-through rate) and are stored on your account
The most important elements for any YouTube video are:
- Title: The title should grab attention and make people want to click and watch your video. Limit the title to 70 characters for best results in both YouTube and Google searches
- Thumbnail: Custom thumbnails attract more people when comes to overall clicks. Make sure they look great. The best size for a thumbnail is 1280x720
- Description: Use keywords in the description to help your videos rank better and include links to your site to increase traffic
- Call to action: Calls to action in videos increase subscriptions, likes, and comments
- Tags: Adding keywords as tags will help your video rank higher in a YouTube search
The most important elements for any Xing post are:
- Professional photos: It only takes one-tenth of a second for someone to draw conclusions about you based on your photo. Xing is a business network. Make sure you look professional in your photo
- Relevant keywords: The secret to increasing traffic to your Xing profile is to apply effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. Use relevant keywords and tags
- Grammar: It’s best to reread and revise before posting, and depending on the importance of the post's content, consider having another set of eyes look it over
- Share Images: Posts with images have a 98% higher comment rate
Did you enjoy this article? Make sure to subscribe and don't miss out on any future updates!