I recently came across a great infographic on how to optimize social shares - whether on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn - and noticed a few stat surprises. For example, did you know that B2C tweets with hashtags receive 82% less clicks than those without? But for B2B tweets, hashtags increase clicks by 192%?
A few eyebrows were raised at that statistic, no doubt. You can check out the full infographic here, but below I've highlighted the key takeaways - take a look and consider how you can use them to optimize your brand's social sharing strategy.
- Length of message: Keep your tweets under 15 words and LinkedIn posts less than 25 words in order to achieve maximum click-through-rate.
- Avoid question marks: Tweets receive 39% - 52% less clicks when they include a question mark, while LinkedIn posts receive 25% - 45% less.
- Use a number: Interestingly, using a number in a tweet provides up to 50% more chance your followers will engage with it.
- Time of day: LinkedIn users like to interact with news feed content in the morning, Twitter users prefer lunchtime, while Facebook users seem to engage the most later in the afternoon.
- Hashtags: As suggested earlier, if you're a B2B brand - avoid using hastags. If you're a B2C, go ahead and add them to your tweets (although be careful not to overdo it.)
If you're really looking to make social media work for your brand on today's crowded networks, then it's imperative you optimize your efforts. Whether that's adding an image to your Facebook posts to increase fan engagement, tweeting at the right time or tailoring copy on your LinkedIn messages, this isn't an area you want to be cutting corners on.
What's important to note is that while there are certainly best practices, like those mentioned above, an optimized social strategy will be unique for every business. It depends on your audience, your brand personality, your goals and even your location, to mention just a few points of influence. You'll need to delve into your own insights, analytics and data to find out exactly how best to optimize social sharing for your business.
Questions? Contact us to discuss how to improve your social media strategy.