One of the best ways to improve the performance of your Facebook posts is to mimic strategies that have worked for others. Keywee, a content marketing and distribution service, analyzed data from over one million Facebook posts from over 400 publishers and found the top-performing Facebook posts you should test.
Keywee’s study, which you can access here, lists top-performing posts in categories based on the anatomy of a post: text, images, headlines, and descriptions. Each category uses real-life examples and provides actual performance percentages.
This post, however, only contains the findings and recommendations for post text and article headlines that help you create top-performing Facebook posts.
Post Text
Emojis
The study found that posts with certain emojis garnered great results for certain industries. Fashion posts with smiling heart-eyed emojis generated a 10% lift in CTR (click-through rate), and posts with fire emojis garnered a CTR of 37% higher than average. Similarly, entertainment posts containing an emoji face with tears of joy performed 32% better than average.
“In case you missed it”
Keywee says news-related posts received a 25% lift in CTR when they began with an “In case you missed it” lead in. Similarly, this lead in gave health and science posts a 17% CTR increase and weather posts an 18% increase. For sports-related posts, on the other hand, “In case you missed it” performed 10% lower than average.
Celebrity Names
For fashion posts, the study found that mentioning a celebrity could boost performance by 33%. In contrast, doing the same for entertainment decreased CTR by 19%.
“What did we learn”
Sports posts, the study found, generated a 60% CTR lift for posts that used the question “What did we learn” as a lead in. Additionally, “Do you agree with” questions for sports posts saw a 54% lift.
Numbers
When posting an article containing a list, Keywee found that pulling a number from that list and placing it in the post’s text increased CTR by 12% for fashion and 13% for food.
“Here’s how to”
Using “Here’s how to” in a health and science post increased CTR by 4%. However, for food, “Here’s how to” posts performed 5% lower than average.
Headlines
Keywee analyzed the performance of posts with specific article headlines and offers the following recommendations.
Number + Noun + Personal Pronoun + Modal
Keywee recommends this format for headlines because it tends to achieve higher CTR.
Lists
Headlines that indicate a list in the article should begin with the total number in digit format (e.g., “10 Easy Ways to Remove Stains”) rather than spelling out the number (e.g., “Ten Easy Ways…”). Keywee says headlines with digits tend to perform better.
Shorter Headlines
Keywee says shorter headlines can perform 33% better than headlines that are longer than two lines. Keep headlines under 25 characters to ensure your headline isn’t too long.
Take these findings and recommendations to develop content strategies that work best for you. What works for one business or brand may not work for another. It takes dedicated experimentation, but in the end, it’ll be well worth it.
About Keywee
Keywee helps publishers and marketers distribute content to audiences most likely to meet their business goals by using a platform that employs advanced text-mining technology and a vast database of historical content performance. Keywee has worked with more than 400 companies, including the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and Forbes.
You can download Keywee’s Lookbook at keywee.co.
