Are you about to hit the ‘Share’ button on a Facebook post you’ve just written?

Ash yourself these questions before you do:

• Is it fresh and topical?
• Is it engaging?
• Is it short and to the point?
• Is it interesting for your audience?
• Will your audience find it helpful?
• Is it relevant to your business?
• Will it promote your business?

If you can answer ‘yes’ to all those points, then go ahead and hit that ‘Submit’ button but if there is just one “no” in those answers then go back and rewrite the post.

And keep on rewriting it till you can get a ‘yes’ for every one of those questions … and if you can’t then don’t publish it.

Why?

• People don’t want to waste their time on stale information
• People won’t stop and read your posts if it is presented in a way that doesn’t catch their eye.
• People don’t want to read large blobs of text on their mobile devices and they don’t have time to waste on the equivalent of long windy farts.
• If your audience is made up of home gardeners, then don’t talk about the hassles of running a small business … they’re just not interested.
• If your audience is made up of home gardeners are you talking to them about the latest developments in composting because that will help them grow better plants or are you talking to them about fertilizer that wheat farmers use?
• If you’re a business consultant then your posts should be about business and not about the skiing trip you took to Whistler last year.
• Is the subject matter really going to promote your business or is it talking about other businesses? Have you included a very brief mention of how you can help those who are struggling with the problems that you’ve mentioned in your post?

Research has shown that the ideal FB post that gets the most engagement from readers is between 40 and 80 characters long. The line below is self-explanatory:

Research shows that 80 characters is the ideal length for a Facebook post – this is 84

Of course you can post more if your post contains useful information for the people who are reading it … but many will skip the information, even if it is useful for them, simply because it’s too long for them to read.

Your Facebook posts can go a long way towards building your business … or they can go a long way towards destroying it.

People don’t have to read your Facebook posts … it’s up to you to make people want to read them.