(Note, 12/4/13: When I wrote this post almost two years ago, everything here was true. Now, much of it no longer applies.
The timeless summary: Experiment with different forms of posting, watch your own data, adjust based on what you see.)
“You can’t always control who walks into your life but, you can control which window you throw them out of.”
Sure, some people might overlook the misplaced comma and find it moderately funny. If you had made that your Facebook status, you might get a handful of likes.
Now take two minutes to put it in all caps in red Comic Sans on a black background, like so:
That has 1,087 shares as of the time I’m writing this. People like sharing photos. It requires much less of them than reading and digesting an entire story.
As far as journalists/social media folks are concerned, it means we have to look for opportunities to post our stories as photos, not links. Then you put a link in the description and reap the benefits of the increased virality.
I’m not suggesting you do this:
Rather, look for opportunities to create images like this:
The image came from a blog post by ProPublica’s on-fire Dan Nguyen. But instead of posting a link to the blog post, we posted that as a stand-alone photo, then linked to the full news app in the description. As of me writing this, it has 17,210 likes, 10,121 shares and 1,293 comments.
For comparison’s sake: on a typical ProPublica Facebook post, we get somewhere around 10-20 shares, likes and comments. When we first launched the SOPA Opera app, we posted the link and got 32 likes, 55 shares and 2 comments. Another posting later in the week got 69 likes, 73 shares and 14 comments.
Importantly, we’ve gotten a lot of traffic from people clicking through to the app from the link in the photo’s description. And we picked up about 1,000 new fans for the Facebook page, which is a huge chunk considering we had about 26,000 to begin with.
So the take-away: If you have great art, whether it’s a graphic or a photo, let it be the main attraction. You don’t have to post everything as a link. Imagine the missed opportunity if we had presented the same thing like this:
(Side note: If you wish to share this post on Facebook and you’d like to help make the point, you might consider sharing this image created specifically for this post.)