How to Post Strategic Status Updates

If you’re looking to use social media to market your company, brand, product, or service, you’ll want to understand how people communicate on social networks. The majority of messages posted to social networks consist of text, images, or video. Captions can be short or long, with a maximum character count that depends on the platform.

People who use social media tend to gravitate toward messages of a personal or emotional nature, usually from people they know. They are less likely to respond to commercial posts. That’s why companies look for ways to be more authentic, transparent, personal, and less salesy in their posts.

If your company is building a presence on social networks, like Facebook, you should be honing your skills to craft strategic, engaging, and effective content. Regularly broadcasting promotional messages can quickly kill conversations and turn people off.

You can be more social in your public-facing messaging by:

  • publishing quality, relevant content that you’ve produced
  • sharing quality, relevant content from other trusted sources
  • posting questions to initiate conversations
  • responding to direct messages in your social media inbox
  • commenting on comments left on your post by others

Responding to comments in a timely manner can be time consuming but it is a way to build better relationships with people who follow your Facebook Page. By doing this, you are providing customer service to your current customers and showing prospective customers that you are responsive and engaged.

What makes a post strategic?

Plan before you post. Keep your business and marketing objectives in mind as you craft your messaging. Consider why you put up a Facebook Page in the first place. Was it for building your brand? Customer service? Sales? All of the above? Each objective influences your messaging style, tone, and content.

What makes a post engaging?

Get to know your audience and look for ways to encourage them to interact with you through your posts. You can measure basic engagement in a number of ways, but the  different ways to engage are not equal in value.

Someone “Liking” your post is the least meaningful because clicking “Like” takes little thought or effort. Getting post “Likes” is helpful to organically boost the visibility of your posts.

The more valuable interactions on social media posts are Comments and Shares. Comments show that people are paying more attention and actively connecting with you and can lead to conversations that strengthen customer relationships. This does not include spam comments. You should have a swift process for hiding or deleting comment spam.

Shares are a valuable interaction because someone has chosen to amplify your post by publishing it on their own social media account for others to see. This organically expands the visibility and accessibility of your brand and your Facebook page.

The most valuable forms of engagement on social media posts are Click-throughs and Conversions. Click-throughs show you that your post not only attracted attention but led someone to click the link you provided, showing an increased interest. Conversions are social media gold. These are completed transactions with your company, whether it is an exchange of information or an exchange of money.

What makes a Facebook post effective?

You’ll get more out of your Facebook posts if you include a call to action in them. Determine the actions you want people interacting with your posts to take. Some clear actions include:

  • Signing up for your newsletter.
  • Filling out a questionnaire.
  • Inquiring about hiring you.
  • Requesting more information.
  • Providing feedback.
  • Buying your product or hiring you.

Posts that “convert” to a transaction usually require that people click on a link or button you’ve included in your post to take another step. Make sure you direct people to places online where the actions they should take are obvious and easy.

Understand that Meta does not want you to send people away from Facebook or their other networks, Instagram and Threads, so you might notice you receive more responses to your calls to action when you keep the actions within Facebook such as your Facebook store. Otherwise, they strongly encourage you to pay to boost a post or advertise so your content gets seen.

Measuring Post Effectiveness

Check your Page Insights to gauge the effectiveness of your posts. As the administrator of your Page, you can see an Overview of metrics that include:

  • Post Reach - The number of people who saw your posts at least once. Reach is different from impressions that measure multiple post views by the same person.
  • Post Engagement - The number of reactions, comments, shares, and clicks on your posts.
  • New Page Likes - “Likes” on a Page do not translate to being able to see Page posts.
  • New Followers - How many people have recently followed your Page and will be able to see your posts in their news feed. Conversely, you can also see the number of Unfollows or people who have clicked to no longer see your posts.

You can dig into your basic insights to see:

  • Reactions - The number of times people clicked an emoji symbol such as a heart or thumbs up to acknowledge your post.
  • Comments - People typing something into the Comments section of your Page post.
  • Shares - People reposting your content to their personal or Page feeds.
  • Photo views - The number of times photos you upload to your Facebook Page are viewed.
  • Link clicks - These are click-throughs on links you put in your posts.

You can also access Content data to see how individual posts are doing and Audience data to gain basic information about your followers such as age, gender, and location.

By examining your Facebook Insights, you’ll gain a greater understanding of what resonates with your followers by seeing which posts generate the most results.