Essential Tips to Get Higher CTR for your Facebook Posts

Click-through rate on social media is one of the biggest success indicators of online marketing campaigns. And when we’re talking about social media, Facebook obviously takes the lead with more than a billion active users.

SEO marketers often focus on getting more likes and shares for the links posted on Facebook. However, to utilize the this social website’s full potential, emphasis should be given to the click-through rate, along with other strategies.

Here are few simple tips that can help you get a higher click-through rate on Facebook, that can ultimately result in higher traffic flow to your target website or blog.

Add OG tags

Open Graph (OG) is for social media what meta tags are for search engines. When a link is posted on Facebook, the website automatically pulls out an image, post title and description of it. This info gives a general preview of the post to users and ultimately influences their decision to click on it or not.

While Facebook is often helpful in pulling the right information from a link, however, without OG tags, you have no control over which thumbnail image will be displayed. On the other hand, OG tags extract a suitable title, image and description from your posts and create an interesting preview on Facebook when they are being shared.

Important OG tags :
  • og: image – This tag pulls an image from your post. You can also set a preferred og image for your post, so you can avoid showing unwanted images like ad banner or logo.
  • og: title – As the name denotes, it is the title of your post as it should appear within the graph.
  • og: description – This tag pulls the first few lines of your blog post and shows it beneath the og:title.
og examples

Also, try installing social bookmarking plugins for WordPress on your website that give you preview control without compromising the performance of your website.

Adding OG tags on your website

Most of the current, popular WordPress themes are bundled with OG tags right out-of-the-box. If you’re not sure whether OG tags are properly implemented or not, you can verify the source code of your current WordPress theme for OG tags.

If you can not find OG tags inside the ‘meta property’ within the head section (for example, see the screenshot below), simply install Facebook Open Graph tags to your WordPress website .

meta properties

Headline length

Do you know shorter headlines tend to attract more clicks and engagement on Facebook? If you don’t believe me, checkout the following facts:

Most users scroll through Facebook’s News Feed very briefly until they see a title that intrigues them. By writing short and interesting headlines, you awake users’ cutority that ultimately affects their decision of clicking on your post.

Use optimal images

Keeping your images according to a size optimal for Facebook sharing is yet another tip to gather more click-through rates. Therefore the best solution for sharing images on both Facebook and Twitter is to create an image that is 1024 x 512 for perfect fit.

Similarly, adding a call-to-action sign with your image may give a boost to your traffic. However, keep in mind that Facebook is a social sharing and networking platform in its core and even if you’re using call-to-actions in your images, make sure it doesn’t look too promotional.

Take for instance, Grammarly that, instead of using a direct call-to-action, uses images that explain the content of a blog post in a crisp and concise way.

grammarly

Personalize your shares

So far we’ve looked at different approaches you can take when sharing a blog post through a specific Facebook page. Facebook pages have their own dynamics and there are a lot of tips and tricks to deal with them. But, what if you’re sharing a link using your personal profile? In such a case the strategy should be completely different.

If you share all your posts on Facebook, chances are that your friends and followers may get annoyed and start neglecting your posts, consequently affecting the click-through rate. So to avoid this, I always share only the best posts with my Facebook friends.

Moreover, try to personalize the shares by using terms like ‘I’ and ‘my’ because I know most of your Facebook friends will be interested in knowing about your personal expriences rather than some monotonous robotic content.

personalizing shares

From the above screenshot, you can also find that I’ve removed the automatic preview the posts generate. For some weird reason, removing preview increases engagement and clicks for the posts I share.

Conclusion

When you’re sharing a blog post on Facebook with an aim of persuading users to click on it, there are so many small steps you can do to make sure they actually do it. It is important that your posts provide value to your audience. Therefore, make sure to personalize the shares and follow what resonates best with your audience.

Which one is your favorite strategy to increase click-through rates on Facebook? Share your Facebook marketing experiences and thoughts with us by dropping a line below.

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