Winning at social media is easier than you think
<p>The world is starting to see <a href="https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-lost-15-million-us-users-in-the-past-two-years-report-says/">the gradual decline of Facebook</a>, with 15 million US users dropping off between 2017 and last year.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, Facebook remains <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/#:%7E:targetText=How%20many%20users%20does%20Facebook,network%20ever%20to%20do%20so.">the largest social network</a> in the world. As of late last year, almost 60% of <a href="https://www.socialmedianews.com.au/social-media-statistics-australia-january-2019/">Australians</a> had a Facebook account, half of whom logged-on daily.</p>
<p>And while most of us intuitively understand what others find interesting, there’s a growing body of research on online engagement and the characteristics of viral content.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/facebook-and-conversation-analysis-9781350141612/">For my research</a>, I studied more than 1,200 posts from 266 Facebook users - everyday people aged 21-40 – to identify the common denominator among “successful” Facebook posts.</p>
<p><strong>Share if you agree</strong></p>
<p>For the study, I decided to create a distinction between “likes” and comments. I treated likes as a simpler form of acknowledgement, and comments as a more active mode of engagement – they require time, effort and a deeper understanding of the content.</p>
<p>I found posts which performed relatively well in terms of engagement (more than five comments), could be characterised by certain linguistic features.</p>
<p>Successful posts tended to prompt further action from readers, or used humour to engage.</p>
<p>Conversations on Facebook feeds generally start by “tellings”, meaning posts which contain narratives. For example, what a friend is doing, a video, or a selfie.</p>
<p>Among the content I studied, the more popular posts requested a response of some kind, usually through questions, or requests such as “click on this funny link”.</p>
<p>Simply adding “what do you think of this?” at the end of a post was likely to increase engagement - and this was true for posts with varying subject matters.</p>
<p>I also found posts that were simple to understand performed better, as opposed to those which were vague or confusing - sometimes referred to as <a href="https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/imbecilic-art-vaguebooking/">vaguebooking</a>, like this example:</p>
<p><strong>Laughter is the best medicine</strong></p>
<p>Humour also increased engagement.</p>
<p>Research has shown conversations driven by jokes <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0378216694901171">encourage involvement and inclusion</a>.</p>
<p>I observed this too, with funny posts securing more responses. Similarly, posts that were not overtly funny were more likely to do well if they received funny comments.</p>
<p>Ongoing conversations also stimulate further engagement. Successful Facebook users didn’t just post content, they also responded to comments on their posts.</p>
<p>The take home message?</p>
<p>Although the success of Facebook content also relies on privacy settings, the number of friends a user has, how active the user is and how popular they are outside Facebook, strategically designed posts can give any user a quick upper hand.</p>
<p>And it’s likely you can use the same principles on other platforms such as Twitter or Instagram.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/matteo-farina-908782">Matteo Farina</a>, Adjunct Lecturer, <a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/flinders-university-972">Flinders University</a></em></p>
<p><em>This article is republished from <a href="http://theconversation.com">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/winning-at-social-media-is-probably-simpler-than-you-think-128704">original article</a>.</em></p>
