Posting on Facebook

Chapter 4 of Charello’s Essentials of Social Media Marketing covers marketing and Facebook. An important consideration in posting on Facebook is post length. In general, a shorter post works better. This is because, from the perspective of an unfamiliar user, it may be worth it to read a short post but not worth it to read a longer post. Longer posts will also result in a “read more” button which requires a viewer to actively choose to read the post instead of just browsing and reading the post. Media is also an important aspect to each post. There are three main categories of media: photos, videos, and GIFs. A photo is just a basic image. In general, images should have a resolution of 1200x628 to be optimized for mobile viewing. Videos are the next media type. In fact, 79% of Facebook users would rather watch a video than read information about a product. It is also important to include subtitles because 85% of Facebook videos are watched while the audio is muted. The last media type is GIFs. GIFs are similar to videos in that they are moving images, but there is no audio and they repeat automatically. 

Overall, the information in this chapter seemed to be pretty common sense to me. Minimizing the effort required to take in information pertaining to the brand will increase the reach of that information in every case, although I am not sure what the conversion rate for low effort engagements is. I would assume it is lower than a high effort engagement, but it could also mean that there is a lower bar to convince the viewer to make a purchase compared to a high effort engagement. I was surprised that nearly 80% of Facebook users prefer video to text. I am the complete opposite. I avoid video as much as possible in my day-to-day life and would rather read a detailed text post. I also spend more my time on smaller, older forums than on more mainstream social media platforms. I also found it interesting how important captions are. If I am watching a video I will have sound enabled almost all the time. My family also almost always seems to have sound on when using social media, although there may be some confirmation bias there since I would only know they were on social media when I hear it. Either way, I learned a good bit about Facebook in this chapter.