In this article I will take you through some simple best practices for when you’re posting photos on your business’ Facebook account.

1. Different posts get different engagement.
You may think that whether you post pictures or just text that it doesn’t matter, well it definitely does! It is generally seen that in terms of engagement Videos get more attention than pictures and pictures get more attention that plain text. Personally I see better results using pictures rather than video but video’s probably have a better shot at going ‘viral’ if that’s the sort of thing you’re going for. Just be sure to upload the video to facebook rather than posting a link to Youtube, because as you can imagine Facebook will give favor to things hosted on their own website rather than videos hosted on other sites.
2. Use Great Images
Not ‘ok’, not ‘decent’ or even ‘good’ images are going to cut it here! With so much content for everone to sift through you want to make sure that they take notice of yours. I recommend either a very high quality picture or something very likely to grab attention like a joke image etc. You can normally source a local photographer at a fairly good price or even just purchase some photos online. Some photo resources I like are: creativemarket.com (for single purchases) and dollarphotoclub.com (for on-going regular purchases)
3. Put your logo on your images
This goes back to the point of standing out amongst other content. If your images have your logo on them they will be much easier to identify by someone who’s rapidly scrolling through their smartphone or scrolling their computer mouse. Also be sure to put your logo in a position where it won’t get cut off by Facebook’s thumbnail re-sizing.
4. Beware of Facebook Image Cropping
When you put up an image on Facebook, the image will often be re-sized and cropped the image to fit within the users browser feed, even more so on mobile devices where the thumbnail images you see in your newsfeed become almost sqaure. It’s not until you actually click on the photo that it will show a full size preview. So keeping this in mind it’s a great idea to make sure your image is going to be a good shape for this to occur. Very high quality photo’s wont matter so much, as people will be attracted to them anyway but if you have your logo in the image you want to make sure it’s centered. The alternative is to make your images square and have your logo in the corner as cropping is unlikely to effect square images. The actual dimensions for a facebook image are 980pixels wide by 788pixels high.
5. Know your Audience
Like any medium you want to make sure you aren’t posting things to your audience which they aren’t engaging with. While this will be a bit of a guessing game to begin with as you trial and error different things eventually you will start to see which types of posts generally get more engagement. This differs greatly between the social networks you are choosing. For instance have a bit of a description on facebook posts is normally good whereas something like instagram will normally require only a few words and hastags to see good engagement.
6. K.I.S.S principle applies!
KISS, in case you didn’t already know, stands for: Keep It Simple, Stupid! (No I didn’t invent it!). What I mean by this is your image and the text should have a simple message which is easily understood and easy to engage with. If there is a call to action, eg: “visit our website”, “vote for this”, “what do you like” etc then make it very simple and easy to take the action. As an example lets say you have a sporting goods store and want to drive some engagement to your facebook page regarding winter sports in Australia, which one of the following titles do you think will engage more people…?
Option 1: “What’s your favourite winter sports and why do you like it so much?”
vs
Option 2: “AFL VS Soccer, which one is better*?” (*better could be substituted for: tougher/harder/more fun)
I can almost guarantee Option 2 would see much more engagement as it’s an easy binary yes/no answer.
What would potentially see even more engagement is if Option 2 was worded like this:
“AFL VS Soccer, which is better? Like for AFL, Share for Soccer”
7. Pick your time of day carefully!
This is such a common mistake that businesses make (myself included). We post things to our business facebook pages when we have the time or when we remember to, which as a busy businesses owner is often late in the evening or some other weird time! It definitely pays to think to yourself “What time are my customers most likely to be looking on Facebook” before you post otherwise they may just miss it completely as newer information fills their feed
8. Be as consistent as possible
Like many things in business it is often consistency which wins out over the competition. Things which you should be looking to stay consistent with include:
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Quality of posts/photos
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Tone of posts (ie: fun/serious, First person/generic, candid/professional)
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Frequency, Whether you can only find time to post once a week or you can manage 4 times a day
A good way to make sure you post consistently and frequently is to have a set time of the week/month where you create a whole bunch of posts in batches and then schedule them to go out at certain times over the coming week/month. (you can do this easily and free within Facebook’s page management or using a service like buffer)
9. Play the long game
Facebook -and social media in general- is a long-game marketing strategy, not an instant customer conversion tool like direct response mail or even google adwords. It’s about building a reputation and relationship with customers so that when they are looking to make a purchase for your products then they are more likely to choose you over the competition. Of course you can always pay for facebook ads for more immediate engagement but that’s a whole other post!!
I hope this article has helped you for posting images in the future on facebook. In the comments section below or via email at contact@recalmedia.com I would love to hear from you regarding success stories and examples of posts with my suggestions in them:)
If you would like to work with me regarding your business Social Media strategy then just visit the contact page or email directly to: captain@recalmedia.com