Questions abound about social media posts: How long should my post be? How many hashtags should I include? Is an image always necessary?
Today's infographic, by CoSchedule, answers those questions, based on an analysis of nearly 6.4 million posts and 11 unique studies.
The team at the marketing calendar software company compiled that information and sorted it to answer these four questions for six social media platforms:
- Which type of message (text, text-plus-link, or image) is most effective?
- How many characters per post garner the most engagement?
- How many hashtags are most effective?
- Are emojis useful, and, if so, how many should be included?
For example, Facebook posts that are text with a link are the most effective type of Facebook post, with images coming in second, and simple text posts coming in third, according to the data in the infographic. That's not to say text-only posts are ineffective, just that the other types are more effective, on average.
As for character count, posts with 111 characters perform the best on Facebook, on average, followed by posts with 119 characters, and posts with 40 characters. Again, a 40-word post is not ineffective; that length came in third in the analysis, so 40-character posts actually perform quite well, on average.
(It will be interesting to see whether the effectiveness of Twitter word counts changes now that the platform allows tweets longer than 140 characters.)
The use of no hashtags and one emoji proved most effective on Facebook, whereas 11 hashtags and three emojis performed best on Instagram.
To see the results for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google+, check out the infographic:
