Many business owners ask us the common question: how often should my business post on social media, specifically Facebook? Although every business is unique, there are several suggestions to determine the ideal frequency when sharing on social media.

Understanding Your Audience

Facebook Insights is a built-in analytics tool that can be used to determine who your audience is on Facebook. It provides valuable data on your page’s performance, audience demographics, and engagement metrics. The “Audience” tab in Insights contains information such as age, gender, location, and interests of your followers. Once you’ve gained a better understanding of your Facebook audience, you can tailor your marketing efforts towards them or draw in new followers who may not yet be on your page.

Quality Over Quantity

Assessing the value of social media posts, such as Facebook posts, can be subjective and may vary depending on the specific goals and audience of the business. A successful post should be relevant to your target audience. When creating content, take into account their interests, needs, and preferences. You should also align the post with your brand identity and the expectations of your followers. Engagement metrics like likes, comments, and shares can give you an idea of what posts perform best. Higher engagement usually means that the content is resonating with your audience. Clicks are also a form of engagement and can help drive traffic to your website. If the post is part of a marketing campaign with specific goals, track conversion rates and assess how many users take the desired action, such as making a purchase or subscribing to a newsletter.

Consistency is Key

Determining the optimal times to post on Facebook for your specific audience involves a combination of data analysis, experimentation, and understanding your audience’s behavior. Facebook Insights can be used to determine when your audience is most active. Look for the “When Your Fans Are Online” graph in the “Posts” section of your Facebook Page, which shows the days and times when your followers are typically active. It is important to consider the habits and lifestyles of your target audience. For instance, if your audience consists of working professionals, posting during lunch breaks or after work hours might be effective. Keep in mind that the optimal posting times may change over time, so re-assess and adapt your strategy based on the latest data and trends. Combine quantitative data with qualitative insights to gain a comprehensive understanding of when your audience is most receptive to your content.

So, How Often Should A Business Post?

For many businesses, posting twice a week on Facebook is an excellent starting point, but the effectiveness varies depending on several factors we previously discussed. The social media environment is ever-changing, and what works for one business may not work the same way for another. As you gain insight into your audience’s behavior and preferences, you can adjust your posting frequency accordingly. Regularly reevaluate your social media strategy based on data and feedback to ensure that it aligns with your business objectives.

A content calendar is a critical tool for your digital presence and is essential for planning and distributing content on social media. Think of it as a blueprint that directs your online storytelling efforts across various platforms. While a content calendar provides structure, it’s also adaptable. This flexibility allows us to respond to current events, industry trends, and audience feedback, ensuring your brand remains relevant and dynamic.

Here are five tips for creating a content calendar for 2024 with your marketing team:

1. Align with Business Goals and Events: Start by understanding your marketing agency’s overarching goals and your business goals for 2024. Identify key business milestones, product launches, and events that are planned internally, and share them with your marketing team. Create thematic content around these significant initiatives, ensuring that your content enhances your overall marketing objectives. Also, consider which social media channels are best for each goal and event.
2. Consider Seasonality, Trends, and Business Specific Dates: Take into account the seasonality of your industry and the target audience’s behavior throughout the year. Certain times may be more opportune for specific types of content or promotions. Incorporate industry trends into your content calendar to stay relevant and engage with current audience interests. Share employee birthdays, promotions, good news, business anniversaries, and other relevant news.
3. Diversify Content Types: Plan a mix of content types to keep your audience engaged. Experiment with different content formats and distribution channels to see what resonates best with your audience. This diversity not only keeps your strategy fresh but also accommodates different preferences and consumption habits. And don’t forget to re-use the content that you have, just in a different way.
4. Establish a Consistent Posting Schedule: Consistency is key in content marketing. Establish a regular posting schedule that aligns with your audience’s behavior. Your marketing team can use scheduling tools to plan and automate posts, but remain flexible to capitalize on real-time opportunities or address emerging trends.
5. Integrate User-Generated Content and Feedback: Encourage user-generated content (UGC) to foster community engagement. Plan campaigns or activities that involve your audience in creating content, whether it’s through contests, challenges, or sharing their experiences. Monitor audience feedback and adjust your content strategy accordingly. Actively engage with your community to build a more dynamic and responsive content plan.

The Bottom Line

Remember to evaluate the performance of your content regularly and adjust your strategy as needed. Analytics and feedback should inform your ongoing content calendar refinement throughout the year, allowing you to continuously improve your strategy.

According to a 2019 study by the Journal of Marketing, ads that made people laugh were 30% more likely to be remembered than serious ads. The top ads ran during the big football game for the past four years all implement humor. From babies to animals, ads that make us laugh are ads that are memorable. They drive engagement, shares, and continued buzz for the brand. Humor is powerful, but how can advertisers and marketers determine what is funny and if it will work for their brand?

Know Your Audience

Using humor in marketing can be a powerful tool to grab the attention of your audience, make your brand more relatable, and create a positive emotional connection with potential customers. However, it’s important to ensure that the humor is appropriate for your target audience and aligns with your brand values and messaging. When done correctly, humor can differentiate your brand from competitors and leave a lasting impression on consumers.

The textbook rental service Chegg conducted a marketing study which found that nearly 80% of college-age individuals remember advertisements that are humorous. That number is huge for a marketer. 

Humor can be subjective and what one person finds funny may not be as amusing to another. It’s important to consider your audience and tailor your humor to their preferences and sensibilities. This can help ensure that your humor is well received and doesn’t offend or alienate anyone.

Is The Humor Relatable?

The field of psychology provides evidence that supports humor working in a marketer’s favor. Studies have shown that laughter can help people become more receptive to new ideas and different perspectives. It can also help to reduce tension and create a more positive atmosphere for communication.

Determining what is funny and whether it will work for a brand involves researching and understanding the target audience’s sense of humor, cultural context, and brand personality. Advertisers and marketers can conduct focus groups or surveys to gather this information and test their humor-based campaigns before launching them. It’s also important to consider potential risks and ensure the humor aligns with the brand’s values and messaging.

Making a joke within advertising has to come from a relatable experience from the viewer. Think about everyday occurrences in life. Cooking messes that need a specific cleaning product. A car issue that needs to be taken care of by a certain insurance professional. Chips that make you feel a certain way. Just random thoughts of everyday things that happen in life that can be looked at as funny and relatable. 

Bonus tip – poking fun at your own brand may help make your brand even more relatable to your customers. Toilet paper companies love to do this!

Tread Lightly with Humor in the Beginning

Humor can help to break the tension and make people feel more comfortable in social situations. It can be a great tool for building connections and easing communication barriers. Jokes can be subjective and what one person finds funny, another may not. 

It’s important to be mindful of our audience and use humor appropriately. Being edgy and pushing the boundaries of out of the box humor and marketing can be great, but it can also fail miserably. Being authentic to your brand and audience can create an ultimate win-win for everyone involved.

The Bottom Line

It is important to know your audience when using humor, and adjusting your approach to fit their preferences and values. Humor isn’t a one size fits all approach. Think about your favorite comedian. Their jokes may not be your buddy’s cup of tea, but guaranteed there is a comedian that he or she likes that you don’t. We are allowed to have our own opinions which is also why there are so many brands pushing similar items! 

Humor is a universal and powerful way to connect with others and improve our overall well-being. So go ahead and give humor in your marketing a try and see what happens! You might just be surprised.

A Call To Action (CTA) is a marketing tool used to prompt an immediate response or encourage a sale. It can take many forms, such as a button on a website or a statement at the end of an advertisement. Basically, this strategy encourages the audience to move forward in whatever the scenario put forth is.

By choosing the right words and phrases, you can create a sense of urgency and excitement that motivates people to click, sign up, or buy. Consider using action-oriented verbs, clear and concise language, and personalized messaging to make your CTA more impactful. A CTA needs to be both attention-grabbing and convincing in order to effectively engage an audience. Without these qualities, people are likely to overlook it and move on.

Write an Effective Call-to-Action

The effectiveness of a CTA is measured by its ability to keep potential customers engaged on a website or compelled to complete an action. 

Here are some tips to keep in mind when writing a strong CTA:

1. Use action-oriented language to encourage the user to take a specific action
2. Make it clear what the user will get or achieve by clicking the CTA
3. Keep it short and sweet, ideally no more than 5 words
4. Use contrasting colors or bold typography to make the CTA stand out
5. Place the CTA in a prominent location on the page, such as above the fold or at the end of a blog or social media post
6. Use urgency to create a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out)
7. Personalize the CTA to the user’s needs or interests
8. Test different variants of the CTA to see what works best for your audience
9. Use A/B testing to optimize your CTA performance
10. Don’t forget to track and analyze your CTA’s performance to continuously improve.

The effectiveness of a call to action can vary depending on a variety of factors such as the audience, the context, and the clarity of the message. However, well-designed and strategically placed calls to action can significantly increase the likelihood of user engagement and conversion.

Graphics and visuals can be important with CTA statements as they can help to draw attention and communicate the message more effectively. However, the most important aspect of a CTA is the language used and how compelling it is in motivating the user to take action.

The Bottom Line

It’s not necessary to include a CTA in every social media post or blog, but it can be a helpful way to encourage engagement and drive specific actions from your audience. Printed pieces fall into this same boat. It ultimately depends on your goals and the content of your marketing piece. If you want your audience to take a specific action, like clicking a link, making a purchase or commenting on the post, including a CTA can be effective. However, if your post is simply meant to provide information or entertainment, a CTA may not be necessary. 

Additionally, another thing to always remember is when you are asking for your reader to do something for you, you should also do something in return. An example of this is if you are asking a social media follower to comment on your post, you should always reply to their comment. Reciprocating actions helps to grow trust in the brand and that is the biggest part of obtaining loyal customers.

Call to actions can get stale over time if they are not updated and refreshed. It’s important to regularly evaluate and test the effectiveness of your call to actions and make necessary adjustments to keep them relevant and engaging to your audience.

Let’s think back to our elementary school days when our teachers would show us pictures of whatever we were learning about. We would then have a discussion about that image. Or the teacher would ask the students to draw a picture of something and then use words to describe the picture. Students would then tell the class about their picture. Brands do the same thing with visuals. Take a look around wherever you are. Find a product and take a look at the packaging. Does the package have an image on it that is trying to tell a story? Is there some kind of visual that shows what is inside? Visual communication is a leader in the way a business sells. It is a way for potential and current customers to engage and it is a way to strike up conversation between internal and external constituents. So why are visuals so important and how can your business benefit from kicking those up a notch?

Pictures are Worth A Thousand Words

Words and pictures work in tandem but also apart in our brains. People digest information in different ways so it is important to disseminate information in a myriad of communication channels. Whether it is blogs, social media posts, short TikTok videos, longer YouTube videos, infographics, music, what have you, we all experience different ways to learn about brands and certain things catch our attention more than others. 

Pictures (visuals) are effective because the human brain processes visual information much faster than text. Our brains are wired to recognize patterns and images, making it easier for us to remember and understand information presented in a visual format. Additionally, pictures can evoke emotions and create a more engaging experience for the viewer, which can enhance the overall learning and understanding process.

Visual data is processed more efficiently by the human brain compared to other types of data. The brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and visual information accounts for 90% of the information transmitted to the brain.

That is why adding pictures to your branding communication can help the brain process and retain information better. It can also make messages more engaging and memorable for your audience.

Our Attention Spans Are Shrinking

One study from Dr. Gloria Mark titled Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity states that people can only pay attention to a screen for about 47 seconds. If you have reached at least this far in this blog and not checked your phone, email, or looked at another part of your screen, you have a better attention span than most. Our attention spans for reading text are also shrinking because visuals are growing. Truthfully, it is due to the amount of information that is presented to you throughout the day. We are bombarded with words, pictures, sounds, colors and so much more throughout the day. Think of how hard your brain is working to comprehend all of this information so that it makes sense! 

With the help of technology, people are able to perform multiple tasks simultaneously without having to physically move around. This has increased efficiency and productivity for many individuals, but has also decreased our attention spans. 

So when there is an image to be seen, our brains start to dissect that image and it becomes literally a thousand words in our brain. We can then verbally tell someone else what the image is that we see. That doesn’t mean someone else won’t have a different thought process of what they see, but that is why images are tied to thousands of words!

Prioritizing Visuals

There is zero question that brands are pushing more visual content now more than ever. Think of the top social media platforms that are used on a daily basis. In no certain order, our top four would be Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. All super visual platforms. Twitter fell off the list because it is text driven. Short bursts of text, but still text driven. 

Maybe the script is being flipped. Maybe the visuals are coming before the words now, where in the past, it was maybe the words before the pictures. Totally depends on what industry you are in, but if you think about it, creating a visually appealing campaign first and then creating words to go around it may seem a lot easier in the long run.

Be careful though. It is all in the eye of the beholder. Not aesthetically pleasing to one person may be absolutely pleasing to another. Images should tell a story on their own which leads the viewer down the sales path for your brand.

The Bottom Line

According to LearnEvents.com, the average person responds far better to visual information compared to just plain ol’ text. Research has shown that visual stimulation, such as using images, graphs, or charts, can help the brain process information more easily than just reading text. This can be helpful in various situations, from learning new material to making informed purchasing decisions.

If all information was presented in text form, it could be challenging to differentiate between important and less important material. This is why different mediums, such as images, videos, and audio are also used to convey information. They can provide additional context and help prioritize what is essential.

Visual content can be a powerful tool to help your audience remember your message. Consider upping your use of images, videos, infographics, or other types of visual aids to enhance your communication and engage your audience.