Tuesday 30 May 2017

The Simple Facebook Posting Strategy That Helped us 3x Our Reach and Engagement

In October of 2016 we dramatically changed our Facebook posting strategy.

A gradual, but noticeable shift in many social media algorithms and an influx of brand advertising on Facebook meant that it was important for us to either start experimenting or we’d continue to see a decline in organic reach and engagement.

Getting your content seen on Facebook is no small task. Especially when you consider all the content shared to Facebook every 20 minutes:

  • 1 million links are shared
  • 4.86 million photos are uploaded
  • 763,888 status updates are sent out

We needed to make a change.

We cut our posting frequency by more than 50% on Facebook and began to truly focus on quality over quantity. What happened next, even the most optimistic social media manager couldn’t have expected:

Our Facebook reach and engagement began to increase even though we were posting less!

Here are some of the headline stats:

  • Reach has more than trebled from 44,000 to more than 150,000 people per week on Facebook
  • Average daily engagements with our content on Facebook have risen from ~500 to more than 1,000
  • More and more of our posts are reaching between 5,000-20,000 people (before we made the change, many of our posts were reaching less than 2,000 people)

I’m super excited to share the data behind this growth with you and take you behind the scenes of our latest Facebook posting strategy.

Let’s dive in!

Data: How posting less increased our reach, engagement, and impact

Posts per day

Most of last year (Jan-Oct 2016), we were posting a lot to social media, especially on Facebook. A quick sift through our data shows that we were sharing more than 125 posts across our social media channels (25-40 posts to Facebook alone) on a weekly basis.

Here’s a look a quick our average Facebook Posts per day between January 2016 and April 2017:

Average Facebook Posts Per Day Visualization

Data Source: Buffer

Reach

Part of our thinking was that we could adapt to the ever-changing social media algorithms by simply posting more. It makes sense, right? Theoretically, the more we post, the more that our reach would add up over the course of a week, month, and even the year.

But, what actually happened was quite the opposite. The more we posted to Facebook the less reach we received on each one of our posts. This graph shows the significant drop in reach during our peak posting times (~4 times per day around July/August, 2016):

Average Facebook Daily Reach Visualization

Data Source: Buffer

However, notice what starts to happen right around October 2016. Our Facebook reach begins to increase at nearly the same time that we began to experiment with our Facebook posting strategy. Not only that, but reach continues to grow as we move into 2017 and beyond.

Today, we’re reaching more than 150,000 people per week on Facebook, compared to the 44,000 or so people that we were reaching during most of 2016.

And the fun doesn’t stop there!

Engagement

In addition to reach, our Facebook engagement began to increase at the same pace. This chart shows our average daily engagement since January 2016:

Average Facebook Daily Engagement Graph

Data Source: Buffer

For me, this was a ground-breaking and exciting revelation.

  1. I didn’t have to post as much to Facebook (more on our new Facebook posting strategy below)
  2. It gave me the opportunity to focus on other creative projects like creating videos, launching the Buffer Podcast, and growing our Instagram account.

The other unexpected thing that happened (as the chart above shows) was that the number of posts that reached more than 60,000 people and received more than 2,500 unique engagements nearly doubled. That was a massive shift from 2016 when were only reached more than 60,000 people with a single post once.

However, this next chart is my favorite one of all.

Overall impact

It’s great to have individual data points as a reference, but I wanted to get a big-picture view of what was happening after the Facebook posting strategy change. To do so, I downloaded all Facebook post data using Buffer from January 1, 2016 to April 30, 2017. No small feat!

I then combined the data in Excel and sorted the posts into four reach buckets:

  • 0-1,999
  • 2,000-4,999
  • 5,000-19,999
  • 20,000+

The results were shockingly awesome – here’s a quick look at the data:

Facebook Average Monthly Post Reach (Comparison)

Data Source: Buffer

The most surprising of all was how many posts were reaching less than 2,000 people on a consistent basis before October. Before this point, I hadn’t realized just how poor many of our posts were really performing. The more we posted, the worse they did! Between February and March, more than 100 posts reached less than 2,000 people.

Take a look what happens to the other categories of reach as time goes on. Posts reaching 2,000-5,000 people stay fairly consistent (which is understandable), but posts reaching 5,000-19,999 and 20,000+ gradually begin to increase and are currently trending upward as of today.

In the next few sections, I’d love to share why this was an important (and counterintuitive) change to our Facebook posting strategy as well as exactly what we’re doing today to ensure these results continue.

Why we stopped posting everything to Facebook

Not every post is the right fit for Facebook

As many social media managers know, it’s a consistent challenge to send out lots of quality content to Facebook every single week. There’s the creation process, the copywriting and scheduling, the monitoring, the engagement with your community – the list goes on and on.

Yet intuition tells us that the more we post the more engagement and reach we’ll get. It makes total sense (at least we thought it did!).

Facebook Posting Strategy - Wait, but why

What we found, however, is that the opposite happens with engagement and reach. When trying to fill the queue with content for the simple sake of posting and having a presence on Facebook, content tends to become diluted and lost in the news feed.

For us, posting less didn’t even seem like a viable option at the time. We have a ton of great content going out on the Social and Open Blog each week – were we supposed to stop posting that all-together?

And that’s where we discovered one key distinction in our Facebook posting strategy: Even though our content may be quality (and awesome), not every post is right for Facebook.

Which leads me to our current strategy…

Our current Facebook posting strategy

The big change to our strategy all started with the counter-intuitive realization that:

“Even though our content may be quality (and awesome), not every post is right for Facebook.”

This was quite tough as I wanted to share all of the great things that our team was writing on our blogs. It all deserved to be shared with our community, but it was becoming clear that it was affecting our content across the board. So I established a quick rule-of-thumb question to help decide what I should post to Facebook:

Entertainment + Educational = Edu-tainment

Edu-tainment: Education + Entertainment

I’ve found that generally speaking, the most popular posts across Facebook can be categorized as Edu-tainment. They are either entertaining or educational. For example, silly GIFs might fall into the entertainment category, while data, how-tos, and infographics fall into the educational category.

The best posts of all tend to have a mix of both entertainment and education and those are the ones I’m constantly on the hunt for on social media.

Finding and sharing “Edu-tainment” content is our overarching strategy, which helps clarify everything that should be posted under the following Facebook posting strategies:

One or two posts per day maximum

The main reason why I believe we’re seeing such a dramatic increase in reach and engagement is that we’re only posting one or two pieces of content per day on Facebook.

This serves two valuable purposes:

  1. It forces us to only share the best of the best content because we literally have limited space
  2. It allows the Facebook algorithm to focus on delivering one piece of content (vs. multiple) to our audience

I encourage you to experiment with only posting once or twice per day on Facebook. You might be surprised at how quickly your best content filters to the top. Limiting the quantity of posts encourages a deep focus on posting quality, which sends positive signals to the Facebook algorithm.

Curated content

Another great strategy for us has been posting an increased amount of curated content to our Facebook page. Previously, we used to shy away from curated content because it didn’t directly affect the bottom-line: traffic, subscriptions, sales, etc.

I’ll be the first to admit that I couldn’t have been more off here.

Sorting our Facebook posts by “Most Reach” over the last several months shows exactly the impact it has had on our Page and growth:

Facebook Curated Content Strategy Overview

The posts highlighted in a blue rectangle are all pieces of curated content. In other words, 7 of 11 of our most successful posts throughout the last 14 months are curated (not created by Buffer). These posts have combined to reach more than 750,000 people, averaging to about 107,000 people per post.

Curated content may not “directly” affect our bottom line, but it plays a significant role in reach, engagement (likes, comments, shares) and page growth. Which, in time, allows us to deliver Buffer content – content that does drive the bottom line – to a larger, more engaged audience.

Focusing on brand awareness and engagement

Focusing on brand awareness and engagement vs. driving traffic to our website has become a staple of our strategy as well.

We’ve witnessed a shift in many social media networks over the last year. It used to be that brands and businesses could post links to their blog posts and watch the traffic flow in. And while that’s still the case for many publishers, savvy marketers can benefit from thinking about their content strategy as a whole – focusing on both direct traffic as well as engagement.

Posting content that aims to drive engagement only helps to build an activate Facebook audience. Overtime, that audience will go to you as a trusted source of Edu-tainment. Then, right when you need them most, you can deliver a piece of brand content that will help move the bottom line. Here’s a quick example of a recent engagement-only post:

Facebook Posting Strategy - Engagement Focus

  • Reach: 211,631
  • Likes: 8,362
  • Comments: 281
  • Shares: 872

This post also brought more than 1,000 new Likes to our Page – many of whom continue to Like and engage with our Page today.

Boosted Posts

Last, but not least, I’d love to address how important Facebook boosted posts have been in increasing reach and engagement on our Page. It is worth noting that our daily budget has not changed over the period of the last year. I.e., our reach and engagement did not increase because of an increased advertising budget.

Currently, we spend roughly $40 per day boosting our best-performing content on Facebook.

The only difference between last year and this year is the quality of content that has been available to boost.

https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-marketing-budget

Boosting posts takes content that’s already performing well and amplifies it on a huge scale. As that implies, the key is to focus on boosting great content, not necessarily posts that aren’t doing well and “forcing” them with advertising dollars.

Doing so will ensure that your money is spend in the best way possible.

Over to you

Thanks for reading! Have you experienced something similar with reach and engagement on Facebook? Or, maybe you have a few posting strategies that I missed above?

I’d love to continue the conversation with you in the comments below!

What has been the best success you’ve found in terms of a Facebook posting strategy? What are your top tips for increasing reach and engagement on Facebook?



source https://blog.bufferapp.com/facebook-posting-strategy

Monday 22 May 2017

10 Little-Known Facebook Marketing Features and Hacks You Can Try Today

When I first started diving into Facebook marketing for business I was happy to simply send out an error-free post.

No typos? No poorly-cropped images? No negative feedback? Perfect!

But with each new post came new learnings about Facebook marketing best-practices until it came to a point where I could explore all of the useful features that Facebook has to offer.

For the more than 1.8 billion active monthly users on Facebook, scrolling through the feed and catching up with the latest news is easy enough. But for the social media managers and marketers managing successful Facebook pages, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes – Making it a challenge to keep up with all of the new features they’re rolling out on a daily basis.

That’s why it’s important (and fun) for us to share all of this useful Facebook marketing information so that we can create a better experience for our audiences. Because at the end of the day, it’s all about the user.

In the spirit sharing, here are 10 hidden Facebook marketing features and hacks for social media marketers to try today!

Check out all episodes of the Buffer Podcast (The Science of Social Media) on:

10 Hidden Facebook Marketing Features and Hacks That You Can Try Today

1. Pages to Watch

Though we’ve written about the Facebook Pages to Watch feature in the past, it still warrants a top mention here because of its awesome capabilities. Marketers can follow up to 100 different brand pages, allowing for a quick comparison of page activity (filtered by top posts over the previous 7 days), engagement and audience growth to your own.

To access the Pages to Watch feature, click “Insights”

Facebook Insights

Then find the Pages to Watch tab – directly under the “5 Most Recent Posts” section.

Facebook Pages to Watch

Add the pages you’d like to watch to your list. Once they’re added, hover over the name, click, and watch the magic happen. Facebook provides a detailed view of every one of their posts from the current week. This allows you to quickly check the top posts from every page you follow in a matter of seconds.

2. Search previous posts for specific wording and insights

Many social media marketers are familiar with the standard post performance data under the Insights tab. It’s a powerful tool for measuring performance on pervious posts with stats on: reactions, link clicks, shares, likes on shares, page unlikes, hide posts, and much more.

But some marketers may be unfamiliar with another great Facebook marketing feature that I like to call the Published “Post Search” tool under your page’s “Publishing Tools” tab.

Search Published Posts in Facebook

I love this feature because I can easily search for posts around certain topics and see what wording, images, or a combination of both has worked previously.

It’s also very useful for brands that post content more than once throughout the year (which we find very successful here at Buffer with our Rebuffer tool) as it helps to avoid duplicating poor-performing content.

Before posting an older article, ask: Have I posted this content before?

  • If no – What other sorts of posts have recently been successful and how can I replicate that success?
  • If yes – How can I repurpose this content to ensure that it reaches a brand new set of eyes?

3. Like a Page as your brand

A great way to support and show some love towards other brands on Facebook is to like their page from your personal page. But did you know that you can also like other brands’ pages as your business page? Yup!

This nifty little feature from Facebook allows marketers to support their favorite brands from their own business page.

To like another brand from your business page, search for the page you want to “Like” and go to their timeline. Then, click the small gear icon and select “Like As Your Page”:

How to Like a Facebook Business Page

All of the Facebook Businesses Pages that you manage will appear in the dropdown menu and there you can click “save.” Voilà!

4. Save an article for later

With Facebook’s “Save for Later” feature, you can save and bookmark some of the things you see on Facebook to view later, like the links or videos your friends post, upcoming events, Pages or photos.

I love this feature because I’m often on-the-go when perusing Facebook and so it helps me to save things I may want to share later and tag important news about marketing or social media that I should read.

To utilize the save feature:

From your news feed, click the arrow in the right corner on an update you want to save:

Facebook Save Feature, Facebook, Facebook marketing

From a page click the “gear icon” and then select “Save Link”

From an event click the “ribbon icon” and then select “Save”

To view saved posts or articles:

You can go directly to www.facebook.com/saved or access your saved articles from your news feed on the left hand side as shown below.

Facebook, Facebook marketing, facebook save for late, facebook features

Happy saving!

5. Suggest Your Page to Email Contacts

Talk about little-known, but totally awesome Facebook hacks! This one is buried within your Page options and magical once you find it.

As a small business or a brand that’s just getting started on Facebook, it’s beneficial for you to be able to invite your email contacts to Like your Page for initial growth.

All you have to do it click on the “…” button on your Business Page:

Suggest Page to Email Contacts 1

Then, select “Suggest Page”:

Suggest Page to Email Contacts 2

Once you select “Suggest Page,” a pop-up menu will give you the various email integration options that you can use to import your contacts. As seen here:

Suggest Page to Email Contacts

Keep in mind that there are a few limitations here. You can only upload 5,000 contacts per day, so that’s something to keep in mind if you’re trying to bring in a large customer or subscriber list. Still, 5,000 contacts per day is a fantastic start!

6. Audience Insights

One of my favorite hidden Facebook marketing features, especially with the prevalence of paid advertising, is Audience Insights. Facebook’s Audience Insights provides detailed information about your target audience so that you can create more relevant content. The more relevant content that you deliver, the further your Facebook advertising dollar will go.

It’s also an amazing tool to create interesting and engaging statistical graphics about the global Facebook audience or your specific page’s demographic information. SproutSocial dug into their demographic data to create a fun infographic for their blog and various social media channels – proving that the opportunities are endless.

Facebook Insights, Audience Insights, Facebook Marketing, Facebook

7. Invite people who have engaged with your post to Like your Page

For small businesses and brands looking to get the most out of every single Facebook post, there’s a hidden option to invite people who have engaged with your content on Facebook to Like your page.

To access this feature, locate the hyperlink underneath the each post that shows how many people have liked it and the number of comments. It looks something like this:

Invite People to Like Your Page on Facebook

Next, click directly on that link (works for both desktop and mobile). That will bring up the full list of people who have liked the post. On the right hand side of the pop-up menu it’ll show which people currently like your page or not. If they don’t, you can quickly invite them to Like your page directly within that list. Done!

8. Facebook Pixel

For social media marketers looking to measure ROI on social media, utilizing the Facebook Pixel is an absolute must. Facebook provides detailed instructions on setting up your Facebook Pixel for the first time. And have no fear, you don’t have to be a developer to easily set it up.

Here’s how:

Facebook Pixel, facebook marketing features, facebook marketing

The Facebook Pixel allows you to:

  1. Build Custom Audiences from your website for remarketing
  2. Optimize ads for conversions
  3. Track conversions and attribute them back to your ads

If you’re spending money to advertise online, social media ads may very well earn you the biggest returns, but it’s important to closely track your results. 

9. Pin posts to the top of your Facebook page

Pinning posts to the top of your brand’s page is a simple, yet extremely useful top-of-mind social media marketing strategy to point your audience to important company posts, announcements, and events.

On your timeline, find the post that you would like to pin, click the down arrow in the corner of the post, and click “Pin to Top.” It’s as easy as that!

Pin Facebook Post to Top of Page

One important thing to remember about pinning posts to the top of your page is to keep them fresh by rotating pinned posts often, especially if they are time-sensitive.

Mixing it up also allows you to showcase a much larger variety of posts. I recommend changing the pinned post once every two weeks or so.

10. Customize the Look of Your Facebook Business Page

Facebook recently rolled out a cool new feature that allows businesses to customize the look of their page based on their business type. This is a great option for businesses looking to rearrange their page and put the most important content first.

To access this feature, go to Settings under your business page and on the left there’s an option to “Edit Page”:

Facebook Edit Page Settings

You’ll then see a new “Template” option you can edit.

From there, you can choose from the default Standard template or other awesome layouts for businesses such as:

  • Services
  • Non Profits
  • Venues
  • Politicians,
  • Restaurants
  • and more!

Facebook Business Page Templates

We currently have the Standard template set up where reviews and recent posts are shown at the top followed by photos and videos that we’ve shared recently. But there are so many great layouts!

Over to you!

Did we miss any hidden Facebook marketing features or hacks above?

We’d love to know which features you use as social media managers and marketers to help make your Page stand out from the crowd!



source http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bufferapp/~3/3Ia0aTnR8yI/11-hidden-facebook-marketing-features

Thursday 18 May 2017

How to Craft the Perfect Post on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

Managing a social media strategy is consistently challenging for individuals and businesses of all sizes.

There’s the art of uncovering when to post your content. Continually measuring your ROI and social analytics. And, of course, the constant demand for fresh, engaging content to be shared.

Added to that, each major social network has continued to diverge both in how they are set up and what your audiences expect on each one. Each different platform also has its own set of character limits, best times to post, ideal image sizes and more. The way to get the most engagement on Instagram is very different than Twitter for example, – even for the same exact article or topic!

With limited time and resources, creating a unique post for each social media channel can be a challenge, but it’s well-worth the effort.

So what does the perfect post for each social network look like?

In this article, we’ll guide you through the process of creating epic, engaging and beautifully crafted messages for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We’d also love to share a very special new Buffer feature with you to help you craft the perfect update for every social platform in one seamless experience.

Apply best social media marketing practices and enjoy greater customization of posts with Tailored Posts in the Buffer browser extension.

Learn more about Tailored Posts

Why you should tailor your content to each social channel

From our own research and in seeing the best practices of brands like Nike, NASA and leading agencies like VaynerMedia, we’ve noticed an increasingly common trend – prominent brands and those successful on social media are changing their message between networks for any given post.

Some examples of this include:

  • Adding hashtags to posts on Twitter and Instagram
  • Having a longer description on Linkedin and Google+
  • Tell stories and use more shareable copy on Facebook

Having a unique voice and sharing content with a message targeted to the right audience on the right network, can make a huge difference in the amount of engagement your posts get and how far your message reaches.

Tailored content in action

Here’s a look at how Nike share the same content and message across different platforms:

Facebook

On Facebook, Nike has made great use of the large Facebook character limit:

Twitter

On Twitter, Nike has reduced the message to fit within Twitter’s 140 character limit and kept things simple by using the last line of the verse and embedding the accompanying video natively:

This theory was the driving force behind developing the new Tailored Posts in the Buffer browser extension. We wanted customers to be able to optimize their messages for each social network, in one go 🚀

How to craft the perfect post on each social network

 

A handy guide to create the perfect social media posts.

Platforms:

How to create the perfect Facebook post

5 tips for crafting engaging copy for Facebook

No matter what type of post you’re sharing on Facebook, the copy you add alongside your content can be key in how it performs. Here’re a few tips to creating some awesome copy to boost your reach and engagement:

1. Experiment with post length

Facebook’s character limit on status updates is a whopping 63,206. However, when we studied Facebook post engagement a few years back we discovered that posts with 80 characters or less receive 66 percent higher engagement.

National Public Radio (NPR) also studied over 3,000 of their Facebook link posts and found that shorter posts (those under 120 characters) had higher click-through rates than longer posts (those above 280 characters). What’s also interesting is that NPR found longer posts received more “Other Clicks” such as clicks to “See More”.

It’s worth experimenting with both short and long posts to see what works best for your social media goals. It appears that short copy could work well for clicks, whereas longer copy could work better for engagement.

2. Ask a question

Questions are a great way to pique interest as someone scrolls through their Facebook feed. Questions can often turn an average status into a great one.

For example, instead of:

  • Here’s our complete guide to Facebook Ads ❌

You could include a question to make the copy more interesting:

  • Stuck on Facebook Advertising? We were, too! Here’s our complete guide ✅

3. Use a list

Lists usually work well too for giving context and invoking intrigue. Try breaking out some of the key points from your Facebook post into a few quick bullet points to include within your status.

4. Add a quote from your content

Is there a cool stat or quote from the article? If so, you could use that and then give context to your post.

Whether you’re linking to a blog post, sharing a video or any kind of Facebook post, there might be some great quotes within the content you could pull out and add to your post.

For example: Rather than “83% of marketers plan on Instagram Ads” you could write “Did you know that 83% of marketers plan on Instagram Ads? Here’s how you can get ahead of the curve!”

5. Include an emoji or two 😉

Hubspot discovered that emojis in your post can increase likes by 57 percent, comments by 33 percent and shares by 33 percent over posts without them. Experiment with adding emojis to your copy to see how it affects enagement.

Ideal image sizes for Facebook

An incredible 300 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day. For the best chance of standing out from the crowd and grabbing your audience’s attention as they scroll through their News Feed, the first thing to do is ensure your image sizes are spot on.

Here’s a quick overview of ideal images sizes for both shared images and link images on Facebook.

Shared image

An image is one of the most popular types of content to share on Facebook. When you share an image it’ll appear on your Page’s timeline and also in your followers’ News Feeds.

The recommended upload size for images on Facebook 1,200 x 630 pixels.

Shared link

Links are another popular way to share to Facebook. When you share a link to Facebook, the image specified within the webpage’s metadata will be pulled into your post automatically. The optimum size for a shared link image on Facebook is 1,200 x 627 pixels. 

How to create the perfect Instagram post


cters, and after three lines of text, they become truncated with an ellipsis.

Ideally, you want to grab the readers attention with your opening line or two in order to provide context to your post or encourage them to keep reading further through your caption.

2. Experiment with micro-blogging

A new trend that’s growing on Instagram is to use the caption much like a short-form blog post to share valuable content with your audience.

Microblogging on Instagram allows you to elaborate a subject in more depth than a quick one or two line caption. For example, you could use Instagram captions to share:

  • Tutorials: You could use the Instagram caption to share a tutorial or how to with your audience. For example, if you’re sharing an image some food, you could share the recipe in the caption.
  • Tips and tricks: Bite-sized snippets related to the theme of your Instagram post. For example, accompanying an image of a beautiful workspace you could write about tips to create a productive work environment.
  • Behind-the-scenes: Take your audience behind the scenes by using the caption to tell the story behind the image. For example, if you’re sharing an image of a team member, you could expand on their story of their role at the company.

A couple of examples of micro-blogging on Instagram include: Jordan Syatt (@SyattFitness) and Steve Babcock (@stevehappens).

3. Add hashtags

Hashtags allow Instagrammers to discover content and accounts to follow. Research from Track Maven found that posts with over 11 hashtags tend to get more engagement. 

Experiment with adding various hashtags to your posts and see how they affect your reach and engagement.

Top tip: If you would like to avoid adding too many hashtags to your caption, you can also add hashtags as comments.

4. Encourage replies

Asking your followers to respond directly to your post is one of the best ways to increase engagement on your Instagram posts. For example, DRock captioned a recent Instagram post about sneakers:  “I love sneakers. What’s your favorite sneaker? ❤️👟

Think about questions you can ask and ways you can encourage your audience to comment on your Instagram posts. Often, all it takes is a little nudge to get the conversation flowing.

Ideal image sizes for Instagram

You can now upload landscape (horizontal) or portrait (vertical) photos to Instagram as well as traditional square images. Here are the best sizes for Instagram’s three image types:

Square Instagram image

The ideal size for a square Instagram image is 1080px in width by 1080px in height.


Vertical Instagram image

The ideal size for a vertical Instagram image is 1080px in width by 1350px in height.


Horizontal Instagram image

The ideal size for a horizontal Instagram image is 1080px in width by 566px in height. 

How to create the perfect Twitter post


4 tips for crafting engaging copy for Twitter

Minor tweaks to the copy in your tweets can drive huge improvements in your results. Here are 4 tips for creating awesome tweets:

1. Try to avoid using all 140 characters

Through rumors are always circling about Twitter’s character limit, tweets still come with a maximum of 140 characters. However, any images, videos, polls, or tweets that you quote don’t count against your 140 characters.

Buddy Media found that Tweets shorter than 100 characters get a 17 percent higher engagement rate. And more recently, Twitter shared that Promoted Tweets with 40-60 characters of copy result in a much lower CPA than longer Tweets.

If you want to make an impact with your copy, try to keep it as short as possible.

2. Avoid too many distracting hashtags

Twitter is where hashtags exploded into mainstream internet culture, but interestingly, jamming a number of hashtags into your tweets probably won’t drive too many clicks.

Joe Wadlington explains more on Twitter’s Business blog:

Hashtags link to all the other mentions of that phrase, and are useful if you’re focused on engagement. But, if your goal is have people go to your website or follow your account, you don’t want to risk someone clicking on a hashtag instead of your call-to-action.

Think about the purpose of your post before you add any hashtags. If you’re looking for this post to reach new audiences or trying to boost engagement, a hashtag or two can make sense. But if you’re looking for clicks from your existing audience, it could be best to not use hashtags at all.

3. Rewrite headlines when sharing links

When sharing a link to Twitter, think about alternate headlines you could share or ways you could use some key quotes or stats from the post within your 140 characters.

When links are shared to Twitter, the headline is displayed within the Twitter card and it can be good to avoid repeating it in your tweet, too.

4. Tell the reader if your content is “new”

Twitter is all about real-time and in-the-moment content. When people open up their timelines they’re often looking to discover what’s going on in the world that they care about.

With Twitter Ads, tweets that mention “new” products or services achieve a 10 percent lower CPA and a 26 percent lower cost-per-link-click (CPLC) and we believe the same to be true for oragnic, non-promoted tweets.

If you want to boost your clicks and engagement, tell your audience when something is “new”. 

Ideal image sizes for Twitter

Images now appear uncropped on Twitter, so you can experience and present them as they were meant to be viewed. The minimum display size for an image on Twitter is 440 x 220.

Here are some recommended guidelines for Twitter images:

  • Minimum image size 440 x 220 pixels (a 2:1 ratio)
  • You can tweet up to 4 images within one tweet
  • Maximum display size 1024 x 512 pixels
  • Photos can be up to 5MB; animated GIFs can be up to 5MB on mobile, and up to 15MB on web
  • You can upload  GIF, JPEG, and PNG files
  • Your photo will be automatically scaled for display in your expanded Tweet and in your user gallery

At Buffer, we tend to make our images 1024 x 512 pixels for Twitter. 

Crafting the perfect message with Tailored Posts in the Buffer browser extension

We now know the importance of tailoring your message to each social platform you’re sharing on, but there hasn’t always been a great way to do it.

Traditionally, the two options for doing this are either to go to each network individually for each piece of content or repeatedly open the Buffer composer (or any other tool you may use) and share to one network at a time. We wanted to improve that.

With Tailored Posts, you can open it on any web page and instantly have a starting point ready for you to customize your post for each network.

We hope the new update makes it simpler for you to handle varying character limits, media attachments, tagging others across networks, and more. Tailored Posts also has a bunch of useful features, including:

Customize your posts for each social network

Create unique and authentic messages for each social network. With Tailored Posts, it’s easy to change your message between profiles for any given post.

Share unique images & video

Use unique images and videos with appropriate sizes on each social platform.

Learn more about Tailored Posts

Over to you

It’s amazing to think about all the possibilities and various ways you can share your content across social media platforms.

How do you share your tailor your content to each social network?

I’d love to hear any tips and ideas you’ve used that I might not have mentioned here in this post. Feel free to share your future ideas as well! Looking forward to hearing from you.



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