Social Media 101: How To Structure Updates for Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter

Does the way you structure a social media update have a significant impact on clickthroughs, shares, and overall engagement?

Data shared by digital marketers Jon Loomer and Dan Zarrella appears to answer this question with a resounding, “Yes structure matters!”

Before diving into how you should structure social media updates, I want to emphasize the following:

Your updates should be crafted to ensure people engage your update in a way that is in line with your goals.

What do I mean?

You’ll likely be sharing content on your social channels with a variety of goals in mind. With each of those different goals comes better and worse ways to structure social media updates.

It’s up to you to determine that goal, and then structure your updates in accordance with that goal.

• Do you want engagement on social media?

• Are you trying to build awareness of a new product?

• Are you attempting to drive traffic to your blog post?

• Is the goal to quickly drive revenue?

Choose your goal, then read on!

Structuring an Effective Facebook Post

After Facebook made significant changes to their News Feed algorithm, marketers quickly jumped on the photo-sharing bandwagon.

“Photos receive more engagement than standard links. If you want engagement, you should share more photos.”

So, naturally, everyone started sharing photos all the time.

Even when they were only sharing a link, they would attach a photo to that update. Why? Because engagement. (I was guilty of this as well).

That’s where the connection between the goal of the update and the structure of the update fell apart.

Hear me out…

When you share a link on Facebook for a new blog post or your website, what’s the general purpose of doing so?

Your goal is to drive traffic. You want people to click the link.

Sure, getting a Like or Share is nice, but it’s not your ultimate goal.

You’re shooting yourself in the foot when you share a photo and include a link in the caption, as that link is now less likely to be noticed and clicked.

Here’s what you might see as the caption on a photo update.

All the focus goes to the photo and you’re left with a tiny link in the middle of your photo caption that fewer people will notice.

Compare the likelihood of someone clicking that tiny link in a photo caption to the likelihood of someone clicking anywhere in this link preview.

People are much more likely to click a large link preview as shown above compared to a tiny link buried in other text on a photo caption.

But maybe this is all conjecture?

Think again.

Jon Loomer did an analysis on almost 600 of his updates and found some remarkable data.

Jon looked at 588 recent Facebook photo updates (included a link in the caption), link updates, and status updates. He then sorted all of the updates by the number of clickthroughs.

Of these 588 updates, the top 356 updates that received the most clickthroughs were all link updates (no photos attached).

That isn’t to say sharing photos on Facebook is a bad strategy. It definitely isn’t, assuming your goal for the update is to increase engagement — that qualifier is extremely important.

To reiterate the point, make a conscious effort to align the structure of your social media updates with your goals.

Simple Formatting Tricks on Google+

There’s much less research about Google+, so much of it comes down to personal experimentation.

However, there are some simple formatting tricks that can help you break through the noise on Google+.

Personally, when I’m sharing a new article or post I always bold the first line of my update. This increases the chance of catching peoples’ attention as they’re scrolling down the Google+ Stream.

I also usually include a brief summary of the post, then, at the bottom of the update, I’ll write: *Read the Full Post Here:* [insert link to post]

(Note the asterisks being used to bold the call-to-action phrase in an attempt to draw more attention).

Also, notice the placement of hashtags at the bottom. I find this allows you to keep your post appearance “clean”, while still taking advantage of the utility of hashtags.

Structure Matters When You Seek Retweets

Dan Zarrella of Hubspot has built quite a reputation for his “social media science”, much of which is focused on Twitter.

How many retweets and clickthroughs you receive on Twitter can be drastically impacted by how you structure your tweets. For example, according to Zarrella’s research:

Tweets between 100 and 115 characters are 34% more likely to be Retweeted than tweets outside that range. [Click to Tweet This Stat]

Tweets that contain one or more hashtags are 55% more likely to be Retweeted than tweets that did not. [Click to Tweet This Stat]

The phrases “Please Retweet” and “Please Help” yield more retweets. [Click to Tweet This Stat]

If you’re interested in more statistics of this nature, Dan Zarrella’s blog is full of them. You’ll also find him frequently posting on Hubspot with similar data.

With all that information, how does a well-structured, engaging Tweet look?

• First, include a headline that catches attention. This is the most important aspect of a tweet that generates clickthroughs since Twitter moves so rapidly. Keep in mind, the length of your tweet makes a significant difference (see data above).

• Second, include a shortened link to the article or post you’re sharing. I recommend using bit.ly, Buffer, or Hootsuite’s built-in shortener.

• Third, if applicable, include “via [author's Twitter name]“.

• Fourth, add in relevant hashtags if there’s room. Again, keep an eye on the length of your tweet if you’re seeking retweets.

With all that, you’ll see something similar to this:

If you want to get really fancy, here are two more tips to spice up your tweets.

• Upload a photo. Recently, Twitter began showing photo previews directly in the feed. This breaks the monotony of giant walls of text the Twitter stream used to be.

• Use line breaks. Twitter also recently started allowing line breaks in tweets. This makes it possible to add blank lines in your tweets.

Surprisingly, not many people are using line breaks, but it does make your tweet stand out more as people are scrolling down their stream. Gary Vaynerchuk, who played a significant role in development of digital marketing business, uses this method often.

Coming Back Full Circle

Everything described here should lead to more activity on your social media updates.

But that’s not the key takeaway from this post.

As I mentioned earlier, the activity you desire should be aligned with the goals you’re trying to achieve.

How you structure a social media update should be different when you’re seeking Likes or retweets vs. when you’re seeking clickthroughs, subscribers (in the case of Twitter Cards), or rapid increases in revenues (flash sales, for example).

Determine your goals, then decide how to structure an update that encourages people to take the action you desire. Hopefully, these examples and best practices give you a starting point.

via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/social-media/social-media-101-structure-updates-facebook-google-plus-twitter-0704722?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=social-media-101-structure-updates-facebook-google-plus-twitter