Are you ready to create your first perfect social media post? Here are some ideas and tips to get you writing perfect social media posts in no time at all. Let’s go!
Social media posts are meant to spark an action from the reader. You want your readers to react by sharing, commenting, liking, re-tweeting, following or visiting your website. You don’t want to put anyone to sleep with a long-winded novel. Every post does not have to be some earth shattering, life changing event. Your post should be just long enough to get your point across.
That’s why shorter posts are generally better. Twitter has the right idea by limiting the number of characters that you can use in a tweet (as of today, that number is 140, although I’ve recently read that they’re considering increasing that number). The *recommended tweet size is between 70-100 characters.
This sentence is 43 characters with spaces. This added text makes it 83 characters.
Studies (Thanks to Buffer for the info) have shown that engagement increases dramatically when shorter posts are used on Facebook (40 characters). A site that I manage on Facebook, Hawaii Lovers Only, averages 80 characters on each post with excellent results! Of course. I always include an image and usually a link and a hashtag (more on that below). You’re going to have to do some testing to see what works best with your pages.
Below are some example posts to give you some ideas for different business types.
Restaurant Owner
- Join us this week for our early bird dinner specials (5 – 7) and receive a free dessert!
- Come in tonight and welcome our new chef to the family – Antonio Carlucci!
- Have you tried our brick oven pizza yet? Veggie or meat?
Beauty Salon
Would you ever wear one of these wigs? Which color?
20% off Tuesdays all month long!
Are you getting the idea on how to craft the perfect social media post? We’re not done yet, you still need to add images to your posts. A picture is definitely still worth a thousand words, and
even more so on social media. Here are the same Facebook posts with images:
Do you see how much more engaging the posts are now with appropriate images? Sure you do!
IMAGES
I personally shoot thousands of pictures a year so I have quite a sizeable library of my own stock images. Sometimes I simply don’t have that perfect image of my own so I also subscribe to a few stock photo agencies. These do have a fee, but I never have to worry about copyright issues and I like supporting photographers.
You can also obtain “public domain images” (that are free) from hundreds of sources from around the web to use in your social media posts. Better yet, always keep your smartphone or camera handy at your business and don’t be afraid to use it! Fans love to see what goes on “behind the scenes” and they also like the transparency aspect of it.
What image sizes should I use for my posts? This is one of the most common questions that clients ask me. I have also pondered over this question for countless hours because I am a perfectionist when it comes to images.
If you would like to keep it simple across many social media sites, I would highly recommend an image size of 1280px x 960px. I have to agree with Ben Requena on the 4:3 ratio size as it pertains to smartphones and photography. See the infographic below:
If you use these sizes, be sure to keep the most important content towards the middle. Most sites optimize for a certain ratio and I will get into that a bit more in a future post. You should buy cheap instagram followers for your account when using Instagram as a platform for social media marketing. This is because it increases your chances of your business to grow fast over social media.
Hashtags
In the “free dessert” post above after the copy, you see this: #freedessert. If someone is searching for a free dessert to go along with their dinner tonight, your post may appear right in front of them. How great is that! Use hashtags sparingly and keep on topic!
