Essentials of Social Media Marketing: Chapter 4

 Our reading this week was Chapter 4 of our textbook. This chapter was about Marketing with Facebook.

This chapter seemed to build off of the concepts from Chapter 3. It talked about establishing voice, being authentic, and determining a strategy for a business's social media accounts. However, the section that intrigued me the most was the section explaining how to build the perfect Facebook post. After all, why should you waste your time with trial and error on your business socials when the research has already been done on what works and what doesn't?

According to the text, creating a great Facebook is rather simple - keep it short, include links, attach a visual, and use hashtags. As for building your "perfect" post, 140 characters or less is ideal. More than 140 characters will force the user to expand your post to reveal the rest of the reading, and if it happens to be "too much" there's a very good chance that a lot of your followers aren't going to take the time to read the whole message. Studies show that posts with just 40 characters receive over 80 percent more engagement than longer posts. Their next recommendation is adding a hyperlink to the business website or whatever is being talked about in the post. This makes it easier for viewers to go straight to the specific thing you are talking about in the post, hyperlinks in posts receive twice as many clicks than links typed into a photo update do. Adding hashtags will also help your posts reach more people since users can browse posts that have similar hashtags on one page. Lastly, adding photos, videos, or gifs really help your posts get more engagement. Like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.