Of those who know me, you’re aware that I’m a data driven online marketer. Even when it comes to social media content, I let best practices and research drive my decision making. I then look at the engagement data and re-assess the content plan.

I realized today that I had been sharing this research around the best practices for social media content with my followers and clients in bits and pieces, and it might aid my own sanity to compile all of the research here. In this post I’ll cover best practices for creating engaging content for Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ based on various research sources (or best practices from the social media giants themselves). So here we go:

A few “universal truths”

These “truths’ about social media that should guide your content creation:

1. Social is a part of the search experience and influences search

All social media posts can (and should) be optimized for appearing in Google/Bing search.

2. All of the social media newsfeeds are personalized to the end user.

That personalization is powered by machine learning algorithms used at each major social media network. Therefore, all social media content needs to be written with the target audience in mind, and once data exists about which audience is using each profile, that data should be used to adjust content accordingly.

3. You need goals to be successful in social media

Ideally you should have established goals for your social media work that ties back to your overall business goals, and you’ve developed a social media protocol document that outlines the goals and tone for your social media engagement.

4. Timing is everything

Each of your social media handles will have an optimal time for when you should post. Because the average tweet only lasts 18 minutes in someone’s feed, and a Facebook posts only lasts on average 5 hours in someone’s feed, it’s important to time your posting to when your target audience is online.

Ok with those out of the way, let’s talk about:

Twitter – Best Practices for Content

The following best practices are from Twitter’s business help center.

1. Identify your voice & use it

• This will help you select the messaging and tone of the content you curate and create.
• Have an opinion
• Share your thoughts on topics your audience cares about.

2. Craft the perfect message

• 80% of your messaging should provide value to your followers because it is something they care about.
• 20% of it should promote your products/services.
• Tweets that contain less than 100 characters receive 17% higher engagement than longer Tweets
• Tweets that ask followers to retweet receive 2x higher retweet rates than those that do not.

3. Use Links

• Tweets that have links receive 86% higher retweets than tweets without links

4. Use Hashtags

• Use a hashtag that has volume and is being used by other users if you want to join the conversation on Twitter. If you’re creating a new hashtag, you need to have a promotion plan in place for people to be introduced to the hashtag for them to start using it or know to search on it in Twitter. Here’s a great flowchart from Twitter about whether or not you should use a popular hashtag or create one.
• Tweets with hashtags receive 2x more engagement than those without hashtags, except or those with more than 2 hashtags – then engagement shows a 17% drop

5. Provide a Call-to-Action

• You should include in your messaging an ask for the reader to do something. Twitter has created a list of the most successful calls to action.

6. Share videos and photos

• Tweets with images have 2 x higher engagement.

More Twitter research – from academia

I also find this study useful. Georgia Tech ran an academic study related to which handles were most successful in gaining followers and it has the following tips:

• Stay positive
• Engage with others
• Don’t just talk about yourself, share interesting content 80% of the time, share information about you 20% of the time.
• Preschedule your tweets so that you don’t tweet in bursts. The optimum frequency is 8 tweets/hour.
• Show off your vocabulary. Use more sophisticated writing and longer words.
• Stay on topic.

A lot of this data is in an infographic I’ve been sharing with clients: http://www.linchpinseo.com/infographic-twitter-tweet-cheat-sheet

Google Plus + Best Practices for Content

1. Craft the perfect message

• Make sure that your first line encourages people to read more.
• Create urgent attention grabbing headline
• Make sure you’re following Google’s SEO best practices for quality copy. This also means that Google+ post will (and should) be longer than Facebook posts. Google+ posts can rank in search an independent web pages.

2. Use Google+ formatting for your post to stand out.

• Bold: Use asterisks around a word to bold it. Or around your headline — which amounts to the first sentence of your post.
• Italics: Use underscores around the word/s you want to italicize.
• Strikeout: Run a line through a word or sentence (strikethrough) by putting hypens around that word or sentence.
• Bullets: If you want a list to stand out in a Google+ post, hit your space bar, enter a hypen, and then hit your space bar again. This is primitive, but it works.

3. Share images and video

4. Tag other organizations/people as appropriate. 

5. Engage with other Google+ users

Facebook – Best Practices for Content

1. Your strategy

• You need to understand your fans, so that you can create and publish and a variety of interesting content that will attract shares, comments, likes and clicks. This means looking at your Facebook Insights data around what content is being shared and engaged with.

2. Craft the perfect message

• The call to action should be within the first 90 characters of the post.
• According to Facebook, posts between 100 and 250 characters (less than 3 lines of text) see about 60% more likes, comments and shares than posts greater than 250 characters. Outside research sites that the magic number is between 50 and 99 characters.
• Share breaking news updates. Facebook says the engagement on breaking news posts is 57% higher than non-breaking news posts, and providing quick updates on that post related to new developments will increase engagement another 10%.
• Use a conversational tone or clever language. Facebook noted that those posts saw 120% more engagement than average and posts with analysis received more click through.
• Adding an emoticon has also shown to increase CTR.

3. Share photos and video. Ask questions

• Photos, videos and questions perform best. (from the Facebook best practices help center). Facebook Posts that include a single image generate 120% more engagement than the average post, and videos generate 100% more engagement.Here’ a great infographic that also covers research behind emoticons that drive engagement.
• When linking to stories, provide engaging thumnails. Facebook noted that those receive 65% more likes and 50% more comments.

4. Engage with your fans in real conversations.

And that’s it! (If that wasn’t already enough as your sitting down to create a social media editorial calendar). Do you know of other great research testing content engagement by type and tone on social? If so, share below.

And if you think you can reach your Facebook audience by just using paid promotion behind your posts without creating good creative, it seems as though that is not effective either.