Merry Christmas! As I have some time off at the end of the year, I’m looking back at information I have gathered in my reading list that I find interesting. I came across the article We tested all the best advice to get more clicks on Facebook. Here’s what worked by Kevan Lee at Buffer’s Social blog. As I re-read the article I had a funny feeling that I’d commented before on posts by Kevan Lee. Sure enough, I found two other blogs posts from this year that contained information from Kevan.
What is intriguing to me about this article is that Buffer used a very methodical approach to testing each of their theories. Too often I see companies just try things without really following a good scientific methodology.
First Buffer started with a baseline of how their Facebook page performed. This is critical because you can’t measure what works without having a baseline.
Here are the seven techniques Kevan used to see which were the best at getting users to click on a Facebook post:
- Post to Facebook at non-peak times
- Post more frequently to Facebook – six times per day
- Post less frequently to Facebook – once per day
- Ask questions in the updates
- Change the style of the update
- Post only link updates
- Post different types of images with the links
That seems like a pretty good list of techniques. I won’t go through the results for each test here – you can read through Kevan’s blog post for the details. However, here is an example of the results from the first test – posting at non peak times:
Source: https://blog.bufferapp.com/facebook-marketing
Here they found a big increase in clicks at 11:00 pm, even though they were posting less frequently at this time. Very interesting.
Here are the three techniques that worked the best for Buffer:
- Share link posts
- Share in the evenings
- Create a main image/graphic for your post
Of course this is data only for Facebook for Buffer. You should follow a similar test regime to see what works best for you on Facebook and other social media sites.
