What is a Facebook Post?

Definition: Facebook Posts are public messages posted to a Facebook user's entire audience or on a specific person's profile page (or "wall"). Businesses utilize posts to continually provide a presence to their audience and potentially attract new followers.

Regular posts are the first step to facilitating engagement with past and future customers on Facebook, and companies that successfully leverage the world's most popular social media platform master the art of crafting posts that connect with users.

Posting best practices

Posts should provide some value to your followers. Simply posting about goods or services will be poorly received and easily ignored. In fact, Facebook has developed systems that ensure ads, promotions and click-bait articles do not show up in users' news feeds at all.

Instead of advertising, give Facebook users relevant, engaging, informative or entertaining content. Produce content that is both relevant to your business and valuable for your followers. For instance, a clothing company might post pictures from New York Fashion week, complete with just a tiny plug for their own products at the end.

Post often. Frequent posters gain some advantages in user's feeds. Their content gets clicked more often, increasing their popularity and giving their future content better priority. Frequent posting also keeps your brand visible for customers, reminding them you exist and that you have something interesting to say.

Don't go overboard, though. Too many posts per day begin to look like spam to both users and Facebook alike, and spam gets ignored. Three posts per day is a good number. Use images and video. According to Facebook's own metrics, posts containing images and videoreceive more clicks and shares than plain text.

Use the right link format. When a user creates a page link inside of a post, Facebook transforms those links into an image. The image is taken directly from the linked page along with some descriptive text.

Facebook advises that users prefer to click on a standard external text link rather than the link embedded in the image. Be sure to provide both. If the link points to your website, be sure that the metadata is optimized for a Facebook post.

Implement proper tracking. Engagement is only positive if it ultimately leads to sales. Tracking enables social media marketers to optimize their campaigns and repeat strategies that prove to be effective in generating web traffic and conversions.

There are apps available online that aggregate and analyze a business' social media traffic, several of them free. Services such as HootSuite, Social Mention, and Addictomatic measure and provide actionable insights on social media posts and how they translate to sales.

Plan a schedule of social media posts every month and stick to it. Treat posting as you would any regular maintenance or marketing activity. Set deadlines for articles, and space out your content so that it's consistent.