If you’re getting ready to promote your business on Facebook, you may have lots to say and be excited about it. That’s great! But unfortunately, your audience is never quite as excited as you are. That’s the truth.
It’s more than likely that the people whom you wish would engage with your social posts, appreciate what you have to say, and jump on your bandwagon, i.e., join your list or buy from you, are Facebooking while multitasking.
Think about it, where do you do your best Facebooking? After parking the car? While on the porcelain throne? Waiting for the doctor to call your child’s name in the pediatrician’s waiting room? While half-asleep on the couch at 10:30 pm, doing stupefied zombie scroll through your feed?
Let’s face it. Your readers are doing that too, which means a few things as far as Facebook post character count goes.
You should get to the point, fast. The long and verbose, meandering lead-ins will NOT work when posting on Facebook. Your humble post that starts with a long apology is not going to keep people’s attention. What will work is short, succinct posts that lead with the benefits.
The other important thing to remember is that if your readers must click to open the post, or they must “read more” (meaning, do some extra work) to expand the post, find a link that you put in there and click on that link… they’re probably not going to do it.
So that means you must take care of the difficult work for them. If you’re sharing a link, and you really want some clicks, then make sure your readers can easily get to the link without having to do extra tricks that they don’t want to do.
It means that your posts should be long enough to catch attention and make people want to know more. BUT all the excitement and benefit driven information should appear at the start of the post, not the end.
To answer the question, internet marketing experts cite a mere 40 characters as being the ideal length for your Facebook posts to capture attention and get an actual response.
What do you want people to do after reading your post? Do you want them to click through? Sign up for something? Think you’re awesome? All the above? Then keep your posts short and sweet, 40 characters to pique curiosity but no more than 50 characters, and then you include the link.
If you choose to write a novella on your Facebook business page, you can certainly do that. You’re given the equivalent of 63K+ characters of posting space on Facebook. You’ve probably seen those extremely lengthy, article-style of posts that sometimes make the rounds. Those types of posts may garner some interest, sure.
But, just as you’re not very likely to dive into that kind of detail while scanning Facebook from the powder room, while nursing a baby or checking social on the commute home, your readers aren’t so likely to click beyond the “read more” link to read more.
Or maybe they do open the post thinking they’re going to read, but… guess, what, a little red thing just appeared in the upper area of their Facebook page, and they simply must see what that’s all about. (Someone reacted, ooh! Must investigate that.)
So even if you published your Last Will and Testament on Facebook for the world to behold… it’s more likely that very few are seeing it.
This should in no way give you the impression that Facebook isn’t worth your time. It’s the hot-spot, the home-away-from-home for everyone online, and that certainly includes your audience of potential customers, readers, etc.
But you really must keep in mind that the Facebook game is best played when tailored for short attention spans. Offer the info. Do it in a small space. Make your point quickly. Post a great pic. Link to a signup form or other method of capturing their information. Call people to action. Show up on a routine basis. Be sure to keep tossing out incentives.
Eventually, posting on Facebook will bring you fans, a following, and customers who keep on coming back for more! Just be patient, but most of all, be consistent.
