You can post an article or other piece of information on Facebook as quickly as you can type and hit the button, but creating a successful post requires a little more thought and effort. Here are some guidelines on how we tend to do that at KBIA.
Maintain Standards of Journalism You Would Have Elsewhere
Social posts - including those coming from KBIA's official accounts - can be more playful than a typical article or radio story, but they should always be held to the same rigorous standards that our other journalism would be. This means that, unless you have a very good reason, you should always be using proper AP Style, spelling and grammar.
More importantly, this means all the information you post must be accurate. If you're writing a post to promote an article you didn't write yourself, this means you may have to read the article several times to make sure you aren't mischaracterizing its content in your post. Our audience's trust is our most valuable asset, so guard it with care.
Keep It Short
Facebook may not have a hard character limit like Twitter does, but that doesn't mean you can mince words. When NPR studied its Facebook posts, it noticed that posts under about 140 characters significantly outperformed longer posts.
Think about how you use Facebook. Chances are, 75% of the time you spend on the site is spent actively scrolling through your news feed. This means we only have a narrow window of time while we move from the bottom to the top of the user's screen (then out of it) to grab their attention before they move on. Make sure whatever you write can be read in that time. If it can't, chances are nobody will read it at all.
Consider Your Post as a Complete Experience
If you're posting a link to a story with some descriptive text, that isn't just a link and a piece of text. The two get consumed simultaneously by your audience. They're partners, and they need to work together, not just alone. Take this post, for example:
Learn more about the forgotten history of the atomic bomb. [Link: The Forgotten History of The Atomic Bomb]
This is probably a bad post. Your text isn't doing anything that enhances the original link - just repeating exactly what we already know. Here's a better alternative:
Historian John Smith says women of the Manhattan Project often get short-changed in history books. [Link: The Forgotten History of The Atomic Bomb]
Not only is this a more enticing, complete story, we've already learned something new! Including additional useful content in this text instead of just summarizing the headline your audience can already see makes your posts clearer and more professional.
Consider this same experience when you post other kinds of media as well. Make sure your video or photo doesn't just do the same thing as its description. They should complement each other and provide a 1-2 punch giving you a complete story that satisfies before you even look at the linked article.
Consider How the Audience Will Experience Your Post
Only about 20 percent of the people who watch a Facebook video will un-mute it, and a similarly small percentage will actually stop at your post long enough to be counted as watching a video in the first place. You have to consider both of these audiences and make sure that the post will still work for them without being totally redundant for people who do un-mute.
This can be particularly challenging for Audiograms, where the audio IS the video. Consider using a shorter quote from the audio you're converting in the text area, like this:
Remember that Every Facebook Post is an Exchange of Social Media Currency
Facebook doesn't just show us what is posted in order of most recent to least - it shows us what it thinks we will be most likely to interact with, using something called its "news feed algorithm."
From the perspective of a news outlet making social posts, this means our ability to use Facebook effectively is built on the history of all our past posts. If users didn't engage with our posts in the past, our new posts are unlikely to even show up to those users.
Every post we create is a gamble - we're betting more users will find that piece of content interesting than they have our content in the past. If they do, we get a little more oomph behind us the next time we post something, but if they don't we get a little less.
It's OK to lose these bets sometimes. There is news that's incredibly important, but very difficult to do well with on social media. But if we do this all the time, we'll put ourselves in an unsustainable downward spiral - that's a real problem.