1. You have to stop the scroll.
The most valuable social post in the world is worthless if people scroll past it.
And most people scroll past most posts – just watch how fast someone’s thumb flies as they use their phone.
This means the first challenge you have to overcome with any post is to get someone to stop scrolling long enough to actually check out what you shared.
A few ways to do that:
• The first few words of your post – the “hook” – need to provoke enough curiosity to grab a reader’s attention. This is true of the first 3 seconds of a video as well.
• The format of your post (or image/video) needs to look unlike everything else in people’s feeds – if your post looks like all the other posts people scroll past, chances are they’ll scroll past yours too.
• Here’s a basic rule to guide your post formats: You don’t get noticed by fitting in.
2. The more white space the better.
Ignore what you were taught in school about paragraphs.
When it comes to social posts, the more white space the better because it makes posts easier to read (and therefore people are more likely to read them).
Keep most paragraphs to a single sentence and never have a paragraph longer than two sentences.
Always skip a line between paragraphs.
The importance of white space extends to images as well.
Simple, clean, minimal design will usually outperform cluttered, intricate, and complicated design on social platforms.
Remember: Most social images are consumed on phones which means your image will be shrunken down and needs to be easy to read in that format.
3. Don’t post links on social channels.
It pains me to say this because it’s one of my biggest annoyances with social platforms.
But the unfortunate truth is platforms HATE when you post links to other sites.
They don’t want you driving people out of their feeds, so their algorithms restrict the reach of posts with links in them.
You’re better served to share the content from a blog post or video natively on a social platform than trying to use a link to drive people to it.
This doesn’t mean you can’t ever share links on social.
But know when you do so you’ll reach fewer people than if you share what that link contained natively on the platform.
If you absolutely must share a link on your social channels, here are a few best practices:
• Put the link in the comments or in a reply to the original post.
• Invite people who want the link to reply and then send it to them via direct message (this can be time consuming, but also can generate engagement which boosts the reach of the post).
• Put the link you want to share in your bio and suggest people go there to find it.
• Publish the post without the link, then go back an edit the post to add the link after the past has had 30-60 minutes to get some traction in the algorithm.