What makes one email campaign generate an amazing 93% open rate, while another languishes at a dismal 0.5%?

Ask the researchers at MailChimp, an email service provider. They analyzed open rates for more than 200 million emails.

Make emails “short, descriptive and provide the reader with a reason to explore your message further.”

— MailChimp

“The best email subject lines are short, descriptive and provide the reader with a reason to explore your message further,” write the researchers. “Splashy or cheesy phrases more often cause your email to be ignored rather than make them stand out.”

A peek inside MailChimp’s top 5 subject lines all clearly state what’s inside the message.

What do recipients really want?

Subject lines help the folks on your email list decide whether the juice is worth the squeeze — or the e-zine is worth the open. To increase your open rates, write good email subject lines that:

1. Tell, don’t tease.

Don’t make your subject line a teaser to get recipients to open the message. Instead, make your subject lines clear, like these, suggest the folks at the Nielsen Norman Group:

dyad: Dictionary.com Word of the Day

— Word of the Day

Term Loans — Rates as low as 5.5%

— Commerce Bank

NFL Postseason Ticket On-Sale Information

— Kansas City Chiefs

“It might be tempting to think that a generic subject line will entice users to open a message to see its content. After all, if users can see the content in the subject line and determine they’re not interested, they won’t open the message,” writes Janelle Estes, senior user experience specialist at the Nielsen Norman Group.

“It’s much better to inform the user and let them decide than to require them to open a message to find out that they’re not interested in it. Many people may not bother at all and simply delete it instead.”

2. Consider your subject line a promise, and keep it.

If your subject line is Get to know Karelyn Lambert, then your content better not be “shop her favorites” with a link to all of your products. (Maybe make that a call to action or next steps, instead.)

3. Don’t over-deliver.

If you promise targeted content, recipients expect focused, simple content — not sprawling lists of everything including the kitchen sink.

“Users expected the payoff to be high when they clicked to view any email,” write Kim Flaherty, Amy Schade, and Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group.

“They were satisfied when their expectations were sufficiently met with content that delivered on the promise that the subject line made. However, they were increasingly frustrated when content was only loosely related, or forced them to go to the site to get the information advertised in the subject line with many users stating that they felt mislead by the email.”

And when that happens, your emails are likely to wind up in recipients spam folders.

Avoid generic email newsletter subject lines.

Generic subject lines — “Newsletter name” — are more likely to be deleted than opened. So says usability guru Jakob Nielsen. So says MailChimp.

Why avoid generic subject lines? Repeating subject lines:

1. Reduces email open rates.

“It’s obvious that if you send the same campaign over and over again (such as reminders for an event), your open rates will decline with each subsequent campaign,” write the experts at MailChimp.

How much should you expect it to decline? In one study, MailChimp tracked the results of these similar event reminders:

• 1st email: Funk n Sandi @ The Roxy on 3 March — 8% open rate
• 2nd: Funk ‘n’ Sandi @ The Roxy on 3 March — 6.3%
• 3rd: This Sat 3 Feb — Funk n Sandi @ The Roxy — 5.1%
• 4th: Don’t forget — Funk ‘n’ Sandi this Sat 3 Mar!— 3.5%

2. Makes your message hard to store.

I save my e-zines for reading on planes. I’ll bet you save yours for a more convenient time, too.

The problem with generic subject lines is that they’re hard to store. When I save one with a generic subject line to my “reads” file, I have to rewrite the subject line:

• Instapaper
• Instapaper-2
• Instapaper-3
• Instapaper-4
• Instapaper-5

3. Makes your message hard to find.

Oh, my God! An article in one of your e-zines has changed my life. I want to be able to refer to it often and share it with everyone I know.

But where is it? Will I find it in:

• HubSpot Blog, Opinion
• HubSpot Blog, Opinion-2
• HubSpot Blog, Opinion-3
• HubSpot Blog, Opinion-4
• HubSpot Blog, Opinion-5

How to write specific subject lines

So how can you make your subject lines less generic?

1. Tell the story.

For years, the folks at Daily Puppy sent out this subject line … every … day:

The DailyPuppy | Pictures of Puppies

I like pictures of puppies as much as the next gal, but I’m not sure I’d open that after, say, the 100th day. But Daily Puppy recently changed its subject lines to include the puppy’s name and breed. Who wouldn’t want to:

Meet Pistachio the English Bulldog!

Don’t write e-zine subject lines like this:

April news from Litmus

New Post is up on That’s Not My Age

What’s new in MailChimp: April 2018

Instead, treat your subject lines as headlines. Summarize your lead article in subject lines like these:

5 Types of E-Commerce Shoppers

— Nielsen Norman Group

Police officer’s good deed draws praise on Facebook

— SmartBrief on Social Business

The Interpreter: How America came to love small wars

— The New York Times

Voter registration + turnout = historic midterm election

— Indivisible

Starbucks will close 8,000 locations for racial bias training

— Eater

2. Don’t repeat the sender in the subject line.

They’ve already seen your From line. Avoid wasting any of your 25-40 characters repeating that information.

Instead of …

Alan Weiss | Unique development from Alan Weiss

… how about delivering some details about the development?

Alan Weiss | Multiply your income with new classes

Instead of …

SEO Tips List | [SEO-Tips] Tomorrow’s SEMRush Meetup

… how about delivering some details about the development?

SEO Tips List | Save $50 on tomorrow’s SEMRush Meetup

3. Drop the date.

Most email clients display this information near the subject line. (Not that recipients are scanning your subject line for calendar information.)

Plus: Don’t let dreary details like dates get in the way of the information that actually drives opens: the contents of your e-zine or newsletter.

Overcome sender unfamiliarity.

While generic subject lines don’t get clicked, enticing ones drew them into the email — even when they weren’t familiar with the senders. (And overcoming sender unfamiliarity isn’t easy.)

“When users are looking through their inboxes and dealing with vast amounts of email, any indication that a message is worth opening is helpful,” Nielsen writes.

Like this one, from Roger Dooley:

Simple Hacks to Develop a Magnetic Memory, more

Want to get opened? Before sending an email, make sure your subject line is clear and easy to understand — and change them up.

Learn more

• How to add a sense of urgency to email subject lines
• How to write a recognizable ‘from’ (email address) line
• Don’t be afraid to use questions in subject lines. But skip exclamation points.
• Tips for writing effective social media, blog posts, content marketing pieces
• Learn to get read on mobile devices.

___

Sources: “Best Practices for Email Subject Lines,” MailChimp, June 20, 2018

Janelle Estes, “Email Subject Lines: 5 Tips to Attract Readers,” Nielsen Norman Group, May 4, 2014

Kim Flaherty, Amy Schade, and Jakob Nielsen; Marketing Email and Newsletter Design to Increase Conversion and Loyalty, 6th Edition; Nielsen Norman Group, 2017

The post Tips for writing email subject lines appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Talk about TMI: Your readers receive the data equivalent of 174 newspapers a day^[1] — ads included. Or so says a study by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication.

Forget kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes. The volume of information in the global datasphere is expected to reach 175 zettabytes by 2020 [PDF], according to IDC.^[2]

In just one minute, according to VisualCapitalist^[3]:

• People send 12 million iMessages
• Snapchat users sent 2 million Snapchats
• Twitter users post 575,000 tweets
• Facebook users share 240,000 photos
• Slack users send 148,000 messages
• Microsoft Teams connects 100,000 users
• Instagram users share 65,000 photos
• Zoom hosts 856 minutes of webinars

Not to mention billboards, blog posts, RSS feeds, social media and social networks, snail mail and all of the other sources of information out there. Alvin Toffler’s book Future Shock didn’t start to imagine all of this incoming information.

“We’ve created more information in the last five years than all of human history before it,” says author and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin.^[4]

What’s the cost of these huge amounts of information? And how can our messages break through the clutter?

What does information overload cost readers?

All of these pieces of information cause:

1. Stress

When information overload occurs, trying to manage information can deplete and demoralize you, according the Harvard Business Review.^[5] Indeed, nearly 80% of respondents to an NPR survey said they get headaches, insomnia or eye twitches as a result of information overload.^[6] Information overload can lead to real feelings of anxiety, feeling overwhelmed and powerless, and mental fatigue.^[7]

Three in 10 U.S. adults are online “constantly” online, according to the Pew Research Center.^[8] And 20% of Americans “constantly” monitor their social media feeds.^[9]

That constant exposure to news produces sadness, anxiety and stress, according to research by Wendy M. Johnston and Graham C. L. Davey.^[10] Cortisol and other stress-related hormones have been linked to inflammation, rheumatoid arthritis, cardiovascular disease and other serious health concerns.^[11]

It’s no wonder that “wired” means both “connected to the internet” and “high, frantic, unable to concentrate,” writes Johann Hari, a UK journalist.^[12]

Some people even suffer Email Apnea. That’s author Linda Stone’s term for the “unconscious suspension of regular and steady breathing” when tackling the inbox.^[13]

And trying to keep up by multitasking actually produces more stress hormones, The Economist reports.^[14]

2. Exhaustion

The term information overload makes sense. In this environment, our brains “have trouble separating the trivial from the important,” neuroscientist Daniel Levitin told NPR. “All this information processing makes us tired.^[15]

And that exhaustion, perhaps fittingly, makes it even harder for us to process information.

“News fatigue brought many of the participants to a learned helplessness response,” say researchers of an Associated Press study on the effect of reading news.^[16] “The more overwhelmed or unsatisfied they were, the less effort they were willing to put in.”

How much effort are they willing to put in to get through your messages?

3. Attention Deficit Trait

We consume, on average, 63 gigabytes of media a day. That’s according to a report by the University of Southern California’s Institute for Communications Technology Management.^[17] That’s the equivalent of:

• 63 hours of streaming video^[18]
• 63,000 hours of streaming music
• 10,000 times the Complete Works of Shakespeare^[19]

That’s 15.5 hours of media a day — not including time at work.^[20]

Let’s assume that eight hours at the office plus nearly 16 hours of watching, listening and reading still equals a 24-hour day. If we also assume sleep, then it becomes obvious that we’re multitasking, not focusing on, this information.

Plus — SHINY OBJECT! — that information interrupts us constantly. Texts, emails and urgent Facebook updates interrupt us every five to 12 minutes, according to information analyst and researcher Nathan Zeldes.^[21]

People have a hard time managing in this environment. Keeping up with the latest update somehow starts to seem more important than focusing on important projects. That makes it tough to complete a task.

“We’re fooled by immediacy and quantity and think it’s quality,” says Eric Kessler of Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. “What starts driving decisions is the urgent rather than the important.”^[22]

In fact, we’re so conditioned to interruptions, that if information doesn’t interrupt us, we interrupt ourselves, researcher Gloria Mark reports.^[23] No wonder, according to Microsoft research, our attention spans last only eight seconds.^[24]

That’s where Attention Deficit Trait^[25] comes in. Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, an expert on Attention Deficit Disorder, coined the term. He believes that the modern workplace’s information load causes symptoms similar to those of the genetically based disorder.

4. Reduced IQ

Information multitasking temporarily lowers your IQ by more than 10 points, according to a Hewlett Packard survey of 1,100 Britons. Smoking weed, in comparison, costs only four IQ points. (And, from what I’ve read, is a much more interesting way to get stupid.)

The result, according to BuzzWhack.com, is “mental Pez.” That is, “to be hit with so much information that it becomes impossible to focus on one thing. So stuff goes from top-of-mind to tip-of-tongue, only to eventually fall out of our head completely.”

What does information overload cost organizations?

All of which means that your organization’s workforce is stressed out. Exhausted. Unable to focus on the important. And possibly working with diminished IQ.

What other problems does information overload cause organizations?

1. Communication

It’s so cute that we think they’re actually reading that intranet piece on the company’s move to develop an agile workforce. Best case scenario: They’re looking at the pictures while watching Yellowstone, listening to Hamilton and texting their spouses a grocery list.

No wonder information overload during a health crisis leads to information avoidance.^[26]

2. Productivity

Employees spend nearly half their workweeks reading emails and finding information^[27], according to an analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute.^[28]

Email fatigue and constant notifications cause employee burnout.^[29] “Almost two in five (38%) of office workers say email or chat is the remote work nuisance most likely to lead them to quit their jobs,” according to a 2021 survey by Wakefield Research.

Add sharing that information in-house, and that leaves just 39% of their workweeks for doing their jobs.

And remember all those interruptions? One every five to 12 minutes?

Each time employees are interrupted by email, it takes an average of 24 minutes to get back to work, according to a study by Microsoft researchers.^[30] And, when your task is interrupted, Zeldes says, it takes 20% to 40% more time to complete it.^[31]

Plus, whether they’re ER doctors, accountants, 401(k) plan owners or others, overloaded employees make bad decisions.

BuzzWhack calls it the “dopeler effect” — “the tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.”

3. Money

American knowledge workers waste a quarter of their time dealing with huge data streams, according to The Information Overload Research Group.^[32] That costs the U.S. economy $997 billion a year.

4. And more …

Plus, as if we needed another problem, information overload helps fake news spread.^[33]

How do we combat information overload?

Get suggestions for overcoming the overload.

___

Sources:

^[1] Richard Alleyne, “Welcome to the information age – 174 newspapers a day,” The Telegraph, Feb. 11, 2011

^[2] David Reinsel, John Gantz and John Rydning, “The Digitization of the World From Edge to Core,” IDC, November 2018

^[3] Aran Ali, “From Amazon to Zoom: What Happens in an Internet Minute In 2021?” VisualCapitalist, Nov. 10, 2021

^[4] Daniel Levitin, “This is your brain on information overload,” KUOW podcast, May 6, 2016

^[5] Paul Hemp, “Death by information overload,” Harvard Business Review, September 2009

^[6] Manoush Zomorodi, Ariana Tobin and Jen Poyant “Get a Grip On Your Information Overload With ‘Infomagical‘,” NPR’s All Things Considered, January 25, 2016

^[7] Sara Gorman, Ph.D., MPH, and Jack M. Gorman, MD, “Is Information Overload Hurting Mental Health?” Psychology Today, June 4, 2020

^[8] Andrew Perrin And Sara Atske, “About three-in-ten U.S. adults say they are ‘almost constantly’ online,” Pew Research Center, March 26, 2021

^[9] “APA Stress in America Survey: US at ‘Lowest Point We Can Remember;’ Future of Nation Most Commonly Reported Source of Stress,” American Psychological Association, Nov. 1, 2017

^[10] Wendy M. Johnston and Graham C. L. Davey, “The psychological impact of negative TV news bulletins: The catastrophizing of personal worries,” Wiley Online Library, April 13, 2011

^[11] Markham Heid, “You Asked: Is It Bad for You to Read the News Constantly?,” Time, Jan. 31, 2018

^[12] Johann Hari, “How to survive the age of distraction,” Independent, June 23, 2011

^[13] Linda Stone, “Are You Breathing? Do You Have Email Apnea?” LindaStone.net, Nov. 24, 2014

^[14] Schumpeter, “Too much information,” The Economist, June 30, 2011

^[15] “Get A Grip On Your Information Overload With ‘Infomagical’” NPR, Jan. 25, 2016

^[16] “Young adults suffering from news fatigue, study says,” The New York Times, June 2, 2008

^[17] James E. Short, “USC CTM Releases Report on Americans’ Media Consumption,” USC Marshall School of Business, Oct. 28, 2013

^[18] Andrew Moore-Crispin, “How many megabytes are in a gig? Understanding mobile data,” Ting, June 21, 2017

^[19] “How much is 63 gigabytes?” The Measure of Things

^[20] “USC CTM Releases Report on Americans’ Media Consumption,” Oct. 28. 2013

^[21] Nathan Zeldes, “Effects of information overload #1: time loss” (PDF), white paper, Sept. 19, 2012

^[22] Sharon Begley, “The Science of Making Decisions,” Newsweek, Feb. 27, 2011

^[23] “Get A Grip On Your Information Overload With ‘Infomagical’” NPR, Jan. 25, 2016

^[24] Kevin McSpadden, “You now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish,” TIME, May 13, 2015

^[25] Edward Hallowell, “Attention deficit trait” (PDF), introduction to Driven to Distraction, Dec. 27, 2005

^[26] Saira Hanif Soroyaa, et. al, “From information seeking to information avoidance: Understanding the health information behavior during a global health crisis,” Information Processing & Management, Volume 58, Issue 2, March 2021

^[27] Email fatigue and constant notifications causes employee burnout. “Almost two in five (38%) of office workers say email or chat is the remote work nuisance most likely to lead them to quit their jobs.”

^[28] Michael Chui, James Manyika, Jacques Bughin, Richard Dobbs, Charles Roxburgh, Hugo Sarrazin, Geoffrey Sands and Magdalena Westergren, “The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies,” McKinsey Global Institute, July 2012

^[29] Eileen Brown, “Remote workers now say email fatigue and notifications are worse than commuting,” ZDNet, April 22, 2021

^[30] “Work invaders: the curse of emails, tweets and Facebook,” Evening Standard, Sept. 21, 2009

^[31] Nathan Zeldes, Effects of Information Overload, #1: Time loss, Sept. 19, 2012

^[32] “Information Overload Research Group takes aim at data deluge,” news release, Feb. 3, 2011

^[33] Filippo Menczer and Thomas Hills, “Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread, and Social Media Knows It,” Scientific American, Dec. 1, 2020

Additional sources:

Charles Arthur, “What’s a zettabyte? By 2015, the internet will know, says Cisco,” The Guardian, June 29, 2011

Martin Hilbert and Priscilla Lopez, “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information,” Science, Feb. 10, 2011

Nathan Zeldes, “Effects of information overload #2: cognitive disability,” white paper, Oct. 24, 2012

“E-mails ‘hurt IQ more than pot,’” CNN, April 22, 2005

The post What is information overload in communication? appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

In a recent “Dilbert” cartoon, Dilbert and Wally beg their pointy-haired boss to keep them constantly updated on all his daily activities via Twitter.

“We find you fascinating,” Wally says. “Oh, yes. Every little thing you do is interesting.”

Fast forward to the last frame, where Wally and Dilbert are sitting with their feet up in the conference room, drinking coffee and checking Twitter on their mobile phones.

“Where’s idiot boy now?” Wally asks.

“In the parking lot,” Dilbert answers. “No need to look busy yet.”

Are you meforming?

Do you really think your social media users find every little thing you do fascinating?

Four out of five Twitter users seem to, according to a study by Rutgers University professors Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase.

The professors dissected more than 3,000 tweets from more than 350 Twitter users and concluded that 80% of tweeters are “meformers”— those who write mostly “me now” status updates. “Me now” updates cover everyday activities, like going to yoga or heading to happy hour.

The organizational version of meforming includes, “XYZ Company …”:

• President of XYZ company to present conference speech.
• XYZ Company moves to new office space.
• XYZ Company launches new product.
• XYZ Company hires new VP.
• XYZ Company wins award.
• XYZ Company signs client.

“There’s a lot of me in social media,” says thought leader Brian Solis. He refers to social media as the “egosystem.” And he points out the great big I in the middle of Twitter.

There’s a lot of me in social media.

— Brian Solis, principal analyst at Altimeter Group

This study comes on the heels of research showing that 40% of all tweets are pointless babble, along the lines of “Eating a sandwich now,” according to a random sample of 2,000 messages by Pear Analytics.

No wonder 57% of Generation Y members believe social media is for narcissists, according to a new study by San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge.

So how do we avoid organizational narcissism? Whether you’re developing blog post content or social media posts, polishing your social media presence, creating your content calendar or just staying active in front of your social networks, these seven content marketing strategies should keep you relevant to your prospective customers:

1. Write to and about the reader.

It’s the most retweeted word in the English language, according to viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella: You.

And no wonder. Regardless of the type of content you’re creating, starting with you pushes the benefits to the front of the sentence and focuses your message on your target audience’s favorite subject.

Second-person pronouns — like you — increase readability. First-person pronouns, like we, reduced it.

— Ralph Tyler and Edgar Dale pronoun research

In fact, we’ve known that you was a writing power tool since 1934. That’s the year Ralph Tyler and Edgar Dale had adults read passages about personal health taken from newspapers, magazines, textbooks and children’s health books. Then they gave the readers multiple-choice tests about what they’d read.

The researchers found that the more second-person pronouns — you’s— existed in the passages, the higher readability soared. First-person pronouns (I, me, we, us) and third-person pronouns (she, her, he, him, it, they, them), on the other hand, reduced readability.

“It’s not ‘who, what, when, where, why and how,’ it’s ‘YOU, what, when, where, why and how.’”

— Anita Allen, communicator at Sabre Travel Solutions

Folks, that’s 80 years of research telling us to write about the reader and the reader’s needs. That’s not exactly breaking news. And still, day after day, year after year, we show up at work, open our laptops and write — once again — about us and our stuff.

“People spend 99% of the time thinking about themselves,” says Liam Scott, a Toronto-based speechwriter. “Actually, that’s probably a little low.”

Digital marketers: The results are in, and you won. Want to reach the reader? Write to and about the reader.

2. Put the reader first.

Here’s a simple step: Start your next sentence with you.

• Instead of We’re introducing a new disability insurance, try You’ll get back to work faster, thanks to our new Ability Assurance.
• Instead of com helps you improve productivity, try Get all your work done in half the time, be the office hero and go home early with Trainingnet.com’s new webinar.
• Instead of XYZ company offers SuperPlantGro, try You’ll grow bigger, lusher plants — and never have to water again — with XYZ’s SuperPlantGro

To focus your message on your readers’ interests, put the reader first. Start your sentence — start all of your social media marketing, for that matter — with you.

3. Try the imperative voice.

Also known as the command voice, the imperative voice can be commanding: Go to your room! Do the dishes! Take out the trash!

Think of it instead as the invitation voice: Make money … Save money … Save time … Avoid effort.

When sharing content, write directly to your readers about how they can benefit from your products, services, programs and ideas.

4. Use a placeholder for you.

When you doesn’t work, try a placeholder for you. That’s what the writers of these headlines from PRSA Silver Anvil Award-winning campaigns did:

• Blood Cancer Patients and Advocates Visit Capitol Hill to Inspire Continued Support for Be the Match: July 18 Legislative Day event aimed at delivering more cures to patients in need (Be the Match)
• Teens Get Opportunity to Celebrate With an Idol: State Farm and Grammy Award Winner Kelly Clarkson team up for teen driver safety (State Farm)
• Parents and teen drivers dangerously disconnected: New State Farm survey reveals an alarming gap between parents’ and teens views on driver safety licensing laws (State Farm)

5. Count me out.

The more you talk about yourself on Twitter, the fewer followers you’re likely to have.

Or so says Zarrella. Using TweetPsyche data on more than 60,000 Twitter users, he looked at self-reference on Twitter. He found that Twitter users who don’t talk about themselves much tend to have more users.

“Want more followers?” Zarrella asks. “Stop talking about yourself.”

6. Spread yourself thin.

The more you tweet about yourself, the fewer retweets you’ll get.

Zarrella compared tweets that had been retweeted with those that had not. Non-retweets had nearly twice the number of self-references as tweets that went viral.

“I’m not on Twitter to hear about you and your life,” Zarrella writes. “I mean, unless we’re friends in real life, of course. I’m on Twitter to get information that will either benefit me, or help others (and by extension, benefit me). … So stop talking about yourself, and make content that others can relate to and get value from!”

7. Make it all about me on Facebook.

On the other hand, talking about yourself on Facebook actually increases engagement.

Zarrella learned that status updates with personal references (I, me) tend to get more likes than those without.

That’s in contrast with … well, every channel everywhere in the history of mankind. Usually, focusing on you, or writing to and about the reader, works better than self-reference.

Stop meforming.

One more finding from Zarrella: While you is the most retweeted word in the English language, me-focused words reduce retweets.

Among the least retweeted words in the English language: Answers to the original Twitter question, “Whatcha doing,” including “-ing” words, like “going,” “watching,” “listening.”

As in “I am.”

As in “me now.”

Sorry, “meformers”: We’re just not that into you.

On Twitter, as in so much more in life, better “you” than me.

The post How to be relevant on social media appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Which of these Facebook posts is most likely to increase engagement?

“We’re pleased to introduce our latest WhatzIts.”

“Try these three ways to build your business using WhatzIts.”

“How ’bout dem Bears?”

If you guessed the second one, you’re right, according to Facebook’s own research.

For the study, Facebook researchers looked at more than 1,200 posts from 23 brands. Then they ran the posts through a quantitative model that predicts which posts will generate more engagement — aka likes, comments and shares.

Brand-related posts perform best, the researchers found. But not all brand-related posts: Product and service promotions didn’t fare well in the study.

So:

Don’t go off brand.

Non-brand-related posts — “Hang in there everybody. Monday will be over before we know it!” — don’t engage fans very well, either.

“Data from Facebook itself tell us that what looks good on the social-media guru’s presentation deck isn’t the best approach for making Facebook work for the brand.”

— Matt Creamer, in AdAge

“Among the weirdness Facebook’s existence has loosed upon the world is the idea that it’s OK, and perhaps even good business, for brands to sidle up and give you verbal balm for your case of the Mondays, ask for predictions on the big game and offer random thoughts on things that have not a whit to do with their product or service,” writes Matt Creamer in AdAge.

“The touchy-feely strategy is meant to be conversational — human, even. But new data from Facebook itself tell us that what looks good on the social-media guru’s presentation deck isn’t the best approach for making Facebook work for the brand.”

2. Avoid small talk.

Small talk performs poorly on Twitter, too.

Small talk is the type of content least likely to be retweeted (PDF), according to research by viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella.

Here’s how often six key kinds of content get shared on Twitter:

1. News: 78% (FYI: This is for CNN and the BBC. They’re not looking for urgent updates about your Widget 6.3.7.)
2. How-to information: 58%
3. Entertainment: 53%
4. Opinion: 50%
5. Products: 45%
6. Small talk: 12%

Want more retweets? Pack blog posts and status updates with tips and techniques.

3. Avoid too much chatting.

Tweeters who send a lot of @ replies are less likely to get retweeted than those who chit-chat less, according to another study by Zarrella. For this study, he analyzed the percentage of “@” replies to find the effect of conversing on Twitter results.

How much conversation is enough? Aim for about 10% “@” replies among your tweets.

“It makes sense when you think about it,” Zarrella writes. “I’m much more likely to retweet an interesting piece of content that you’ve posted than a bit of Twitter chit-chat, especially when that chit-chat is part of an ongoing conversation of which I’m not a part.”

4. Don’t answer ‘What are you doing?’

What are you doing? That question has launched a gazillion tweets. Turns out your Twitter followers don’t really want to know.

In another study, Zarella analyzed his database of more than 30 million retweets, comparing them to a sample of more than 2 million random tweets.

The result: His list of the 20 least retweetable words:

1. Game
2. Going
3. Haha
4. Lol
5. But
6. Watching
7. Work
8. Home
9. Night
10. Bed
11. Well
12. Sleep
13. Gonna
14. Hey
15. Tired
16. Tomorrow
17. Some
18. Back
19. Bored
20. Listening

What do you notice about these words?

Hey! I’m watching the webinar while listening to the game. Haha!

I’m bored at work, so I’m going home. Lol. I’ll be back tomorrow.

I’m tired. Gonna go to bed and get some sleep. Night! Sleep well!

Nobody wants to know what you’re doing! So stop me-forming!

Instead of telling your followers what you’re eating for breakfast, recommend a great blog post or article.

___

Sources: Matt Creamer, “Facebook to Brands: You’re Posting Stuff Wrong,” AdAge, May 7, 2012

Dan Zarrella, “The Science of ReTweets,” HubSpot

Dan Zarrella, “What percentage of your tweets should be links or replies,” January 11, 2012

Dan Zarrella, “The 20 least retweetable words,” August 25, 2009

The post How to engage with your audience on social media: Avoid small talk appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..