Have you been racking your brains to find THE content for your social media activity?

How do you engage with your fans: by sharing images, updating your status, or uploading videos on your Page?

If you’ve settled with sharing pictures, that’s one good decision. Read this article until the end to see why – and how – images can spur up your social engagement rate. Plus, I’ll be sharing the best day of the week to be socially active online.

Studies show: Photos boost social engagement

A study performed by eMarketer shows that photos are King of Content on Facebook.

Videos, status updates and link posts are not even close to having the same effect as images. Combined, they represent but 13% of shares. Not impressive.

But…

Would you believe me if I told you that a whopping 87% of shared posts from Facebook Pages are images?

Additionally, photos represent 75% of Facebook posts. That’s way more than half of the content that is shared on Facebook. So if it seems like your Facebook feed is cluttered with pictures, now you know why.

But keep in mind that for something to be reshared or commented upon, it needs to be of high quality AND relevant to the target audience.

So if you want your images to be in that 87% shared, follow these 6 guidelines:

1. Post high quality images
2. Post images that are relevant to your target audience
3. Include relevant links to your website in the image or in the image description (it helps tremendously with linkbuilding and increases website traffic)
4. Share images such as: infographics, banners, photos, illustrations
5. Use your smartphone to post real-time photos from the seminars / workshops / training sessions you attend. Whoa, avoid selfies by all means (unless they’re with a celebrity of sorts)
6. Increase the engagement rate by asking people to give names to your images: “I’ve just taken this picture and I’m wondering about the best words to describe it… any ideas?”

Tip: Consider hiring an illustrator or a web designer if you want a guarantee that your images will be of high quality and good looking.

And…

Would you believe me if I told you Comments & Shares are up 16%, while Likes are down 5%?

Another research (performed this time by the Social Intelligence Report) highlights that comments and shares have increased, while the number of likes keeps going down (if last year it was 82%, now it’s down to 78%). That’s good.

Allow me to explain why.

It takes time to write a comment. People don’t write comments just for the sake of it. And for a post to be reshared it has to be darn good. This only goes to show that online marketers are starting to learn their lesson. They’re becoming better at engaging with their followers.

How can you boost your shares and comments on your Facebook page?
1. Reply to ALL your Facebook comments as yourself AND as the Page
2. Like ALL your Facebook comments as yourself and as your Page

You may be wondering why bother to do that twice.

One reason is that if you like those comments, users who wrote them will be notified about it. If you leave a reply to their comments, they’ll be more likely to reply too, thus giving birth to a conversation. The more comments a post receives, the more popular it will be, thus enjoying a greater reach.

Tip: Fridays have the greatest engagement rate, but don’t expect to get a comment or a reply to your posts on Sundays.

Bonus Tip: Your posts may not all get viral, or enjoy a wide reach. Don’t give up. You can find different ways of making sure your fans see your posts: use paid posts if you must. It’s all about finding different ways for your content to get to your audience.

Bonus: Increasing Twitter engagement

Photos are great at that as well. Until recently, you didn’t have the option of sharing photos on Twitter. Not anymore.

But it is a different kind of images that enjoy great popularity on Twitter. It seems that photos with URLs in them get more retweets than normal posts or other photo posts. By 35%, to be more precise.

If you want that percentage to be even higher you can tag people in your photo. You can tag up to 10 people per photo, but you can include up to 4 pictures per tweet. So that’s 40 users per tweet.

Now is your turn…

What do you think about these statistics?
Are photos getting you better results on Facebook? What about Twitter?
What is your current social media strategy? Will you consider increasing the number of photos you share or increasing their quality and relevance?

Leave your ideas in the comments section.