Tips for Facebook Success

If you are using call-to-action words within your Facebook posts, you might not be creating the optimal engaging experience for your audience - at least according to a new study.

Social media measuring tool Sotrender studied 111 U.K. Facebook Pages from four different industries including clothes, food and beverages, cosmetics and hygiene, and cars, in order to analyze what type of posting patterns receive the highest amount of engagement.

Not surprisingly, the study proved that companies tend to use call-to-action expressions within their posts, including the words "watch", "like", "look" and "click". However, these words don't seem to increase engagement, which suggests that Facebook users become numb to constantly repeated phrases.

Another surprising statistic revealed that even "win" doesn't create much buzz, with only fans of brands within the cosmetics & hygiene industry interacting more when there's something to "win", "get" or when something is "on sale".

The study also proved that certain types of words enhance engagement levels differently for specific industries. For example, fans of food brands are often attracted to words that refer to emotions such as "like", "love", "good", "favorite" and "happy", while fans of clothing brands are attracted more to trend-oriented words such as "fashion", "style" and "collection".

Brands should also pay close attention to the links that they promote, because another unexpected result of the study shows posts that contain links actually bring fans' engagement levels below average.

One way that a brand can increase engagement is with photos, which tend to get 57 percent more likes and more than seven times the comments than average posts. For example, Topshop, a brand from the study, attracts more than 28 thousand fans with photos - with only the brand's 25th most popular post containing words.