Building Catchy Facebook Posts for Businesses: 5 Tips for Success

Maximize your social media impact with these five tips on building catchy content that your audience will actually notice.

Do you feel like you’re shouting into the void when it comes to creating social media content for your business? Does it seem like, no matter how much time, energy, and effort you put into making a really compelling post, it’s just not reaching the right people or getting the engagement you expect?

This is a common struggle for businesses trying to increase their social media presence and reach more customers online. As feeds become more crowded, it is becoming increasingly difficult to develop content that can break through the noise.

This, however, is the key to social media marketing in today’s world. It’s no longer enough to simply have a social media presence; you need to build and share content on your channels that looks professional, speaks directly to your audiences, and that reminds them who you are and what you do—all in an engaging and impactful way.

Sounds easy enough, right?

Well, the truth of the matter is, it’s actually not as hard as it may seem, as long as you know where to start. Read on to learn how you can improve your business’ social media marketing with catchy content.

5 Tips for Creating Catchy Facebook Posts for Your Business

Facebook currently ranks as the second most-utilized social media platform among adults, boasting 2.6 million active users as of 2020. It’s also a relatively easy-to-navigate platform that allows businesses to effectively market their goods and services to a wide variety of consumers, making it a great place to start as you develop your social media content building skills.

Below, we outline 5 tips for building catchy Facebook content.

1. Always Include a Visual Element

When building content, you may be tempted to start out with a primary focus on your messaging. However, while the words you use in your posts are obviously going to be important, they’re not what’s going to help get your post noticed on your customers’ newsfeeds.

In reality, it’s the visual aspect of your post that will be most important in catching your audience’s eye on Facebook.

This can seem counterintuitive to some, considering you may find others in your personal networks can share something without a visual, and the post is still engaging enough that you stop and read it. What you need to keep in mind, however, is that your customers likely do not yet have the emotional investment in your brand that you have with the people who make up your online community. As a result, it’s up to you to entice them to stop and look at your post by leveraging the innate human response to visual stimulation.

To do this effectively, it's crucial that you always include a visual element in every post you publish. Photos, videos, and infographics, for example, go a long way when included alongside your editorial content. You can also accomplish this by ensuring that every link you share—whether it be to your website, a curated piece of content, etc.—populates an image alongside it. If it doesn’t automatically do this, consider removing the link preview all together, and uploading your own image and including a clickable URL in the body of the post instead.

Pro Tip: Each social platform has its own image sizing requirements that you should aim to adhere to when creating professional-looking visual content. On Facebook, images should be sized at 1200 x 630 pixels.

2. Adjust Your Brand Voice for Your Social Audience

Now that you’ve factored in a visual element to ensure your post isn’t going to be lost in the shuffle, it’s time to start thinking about the way you present your messaging.

By the time you’re embarking on creating social content, it’s likely you will have already established a brand voice for your company. While this voice may be perfect for writing website copy, crafting industry guidelines, and creating print materials, social media requires writing in a very specific tone.

This tone will likely differ depending on your brand and the types of services or products you offer. However, the below graph from Sprout Social reveals that, in general, customers want brands to be honest, friendly, and helpful above all else on social media.

What’s more, platforms like Facebook also provide a lot of innate opportunities for engagement and interaction, and you need to make sure that the voice you use to speak to your customers on social encourages that.

There are a few quick tricks you can try when developing this very unique brand voice for social. Start by simply loosening up your phrasing, layering in some humor or puns into your copy, and avoiding industry jargon that might alienate new or prospective customers from outside your normal audience.

You should also consider adjusting your text so you, as the brand, are speaking directly to the audience. This includes incorporating words like “you” and “we” into your copy, and avoiding referring to your organization in the third person—unless doing so is a very specific and branded choice.

3. Embrace Opportunities for Engagement

Social media, like other marketing channels, provides an opportunity for a brand to speak directly to an audience. Unlike other marketing channels, however, social media also offers an opportunity for the audience to speak back.

This is what’s known as engagement on social media, and it is a key component to not only creating catchy Facebook posts, but to driving sales and creating brand awareness through the use of these platforms.

Consider This: Brands with a dedicated social team have endless opportunities for engagement. This is because a social team is often equipped to not only manage real-time campaigns—like Facebook Live broadcasts or active Q&A’s with customers—but to also break down the invisible barrier between brand and consumer with approachable content and calls to action (CTA’s).

For brands without a dedicated social team, the best way to embark on improving engagement is to approach content creation with a similar goal of not only informing, but opening up the conversation. Encourage engagement by asking your audience questions that relate to your product or services, requesting that they share their experiences or thoughts in the comments of your posts, or by offering to share their content on your page if they tag your brand.

However you choose to go about it, just be sure not to overwhelm your feed with these kinds of requests. Brands that go overboard on engagement can actually leave their audience more disengaged, as they begin to feel exhausted or overwhelmed by the constant calls for interaction. Instead, aim to strike a healthy balance between informative and engagement-driven content.

Investing in engagement efforts like these will not only help your content stand out, but will also humanize your brand and help communicate to your customers that you are available for them when they need it.

4. Don’t Be Afraid to Be a Little Less Formal

Think back to some of the catchiest content you’ve seen on Facebook. Likely the posts that spark your memory aren’t those that read like an ad, or that try to directly lead you to a website to buy something. Instead, the posts you remember are probably those that were a little lighter, more fun, and less formal.

This will be important to remember as you work to craft your social content. It’s the reason why certain media like emojis, gifs, and memes have found a home on channels like Facebook. Audiences on these platforms are often looking to be entertained as much as they are looking to be informed and, as such, are much more open to seeing these components leveraged in a brand’s social marketing.

Keep in Mind: This is not to say that a local news station, for example, should go about posting an emoji alongside every breaking news story. There is a time and place for the use of elements on social media, and it's important for you to understand where and when that is.

Consider developing content around lesser-celebrated holidays that align with your brand like National Siblings Day or National Wear Pajamas to Work Day, or lean into trending posts or memes and adapt them to fit your messaging. This type of content is more likely to catch your audience’s eye and encourage them to engage with it. What’s more, developing posts like these communicates to your audience that your brand is relevant, tuned in, and ahead of the latest online trends.

5. Create Content Your Audience Won’t Expect

Brands that publish the same messaging using the same post types over and over are much more likely to have their audience tune out their content. Why? Because the audience thinks they know exactly what to expect from the brand.

One of the most effective ways you can keep your audiences continuously engaged is to keep your posts fresh. Find new ways of telling the same stories by posting a diverse mix of post types and calls to action on your feeds. Here are three quick tips to doing this effectively on Facebook:

1. Change Up the Post Structure

Try switching up the structure of your Facebook post itself. Since the visuals are the most noticeable when scrolling, consider putting your efforts toward ensuring you never publish a post with the same kind of visual element back to back. Instead, rotate between photo, graphic images, videos, and more.

If the primary type of post you share is a link, you might also consider swapping out the auto-populated image for one your audience hasn’t seen before, or leveraging Facebook’s carousel function to share many, linked pictures at once.

2. Create and Share New Types of Content

Another way to share your brand’s story in a new way is by linking to new types of content your audience hasn’t seen from you before. For instance, consider creating and sharing industry- or brand-specific pieces like:

• Infographics

• Graphic statistics or charts

• Podcasts

• Guides

• Checklists

• Etc.

3. Play with Different Messaging

Consistently updating the messaging you’re using in your posts will keep audiences tuned in to your brand. If you’ve been sharing all your posts with a singular CTA such as “Learn more on our website,” for example, after the first few times, anyone in your audience who might have engaged with that CTA will likely have done it already.

For this reason, it’s important that you get creative and think of other ways to boost engagement. Try encouraging audiences to reach out to contact you directly for more information instead of directing them to your website, or use Facebook as a way of driving readers to your other inbound marketing efforts like your blog or email subscription list.

No matter how you go about it, diversifying your approach to posting on Facebook will keep audiences engaged as they wait to see what you’ll do next.

Develop a Well-Rounded Social Media Marketing Strategy Today

Tips like these can be used to help small businesses effectively create engaging social content on Facebook.

Keep in mind, however, that there are dozens of other social channels—each with their own sets of best practices—that will require further time and effort to understand and leverage in order to successfully reach audiences, drive sales, and engage with consumers online.

If you’re looking to develop a deeper understanding of the best social media platforms for your business—and the types of content that belong there—Riptide Marketing can help. With experience developing content for an array of B2B and B2C clients across a variety of channels, Riptide has all the tools you need to take your social media game to the next level.