Facebook is from Mars. Twitter is from Venus.

Content Marketing
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Jessica McDaniel
Published May 2018
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Not all platforms speak the same language. Which means you shouldn’t just copy/paste messages across all of your social media profiles.

Anyone who has tried his or her hand at social media management knows it’s a tricky and very important part of business. All that time spent racking your brain to come up with the perfect post that will get clicked, liked or shared can be very overwhelming. And too many times a perfect post will be created for Facebook and then it goes unnoticed on Instagram and Twitter. We must remember each platform is different, there are different audiences, peak usage times, character limits, photo guidelines, and the list goes on and on.

So stop trying to write one perfect post that will be successful across all social channels and start customizing for maximum engagement! Here are some pointers.

Facebook

Stats:

  • Users: Over 2 billion users worldwide of which 1.3 billion are active daily
  • Most common age bracket: 25-34
  • Most common gender: Female
  • Highest traffic times: Midweek between 1-3PM
  • Peak engagement times: Thursdays and Fridays

Facebook is still the most used social platform and yet most brands feel like their hard work is going unrewarded. Here are some FB best practices to get more engagement:

  1. Although the character limit per post is a staggering 63,206, don’t be too wordy. Try keeping it between 40 and 80 characters.
  2. Posts with an image receive more than double the amount of engagement of a post without.
  3. Subtitles are helpful for videos, since they auto-play on a visitor’s timeline without sound.
  4. 76% of people are looking for interesting content on Facebook. So here’s your chance to share articles and longer content pieces that users will enjoy.

Instagram

Stats:

  • Users: Over 600 million of which 400 million are active daily
  • Most common age bracket: 18-29
  • Most common gender: Female
  • Peak engagement times: Early evening Wednesdays

While most of us will never have 124 million followers like Selena Gomez or get 11 million likes on a single post like Beyonce, here are some things we can do to get more engagement:

  1. Use no more than 8 relevant hashtags…any more could detract from your message, flag you as a spammer or annoy the reader.
  2. Try captioning your photos and videos with less than 150 characters.
  3. On average posts that include another handle receive 56% more engagement.
  4. Don’t skimp on visual aesthetics, choose filters and colors that will catch the eye of users scrolling through post after post.
  5. Encourage your fans to engage by regramming their content.

Twitter

  • Users: 330 million active users
  • Most common age bracket: 18-29
  • Most common gender: Split almost evenly between American men and women
  • Usage: 66% of accounts are accessed weekly

The average life span of one tweet is only 18 to 20 minutes. This fast paced platform can seem daunting but it doesn’t need to be, here are some tips to customize your tweet for maximum engagement:

  1. Properly use 1 to 3 hashtags per tweet. Since there are more than 2 billion searches per day happening on Twitter hashtags are key to being found in the masses.
  2. Tag people when you reference them and they will be more likely to give you a retweet, which will increase your reach.
  3. It is recommended to tweet 15 times a day! It might seem like a lot but many of those can be curated, AKA retweets.
  4. Since you have to post more on Twitter to be seen, make sure you aren’t a broken record. Give your tweets a variety and make sure they aren’t all about you.

We understand this can be overwhelming and a lot to manage. If you have questions on managing multiple accounts or deciding on what platforms to use we can help! Glide not only designs beautiful websites, we also have experienced social media experts on staff!

More social media stats:
https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/
http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/04/20/instagram-statistics
https://blog.hootsuite.com/twitter-statistics/

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