Facebook is the Holy Grail for a lot of content marketers. No other platform can boast of the sheer volume of people who actively engage on the platform like Facebook can. With so many brands trying to compete for user’s attention on Facebook, it is but natural that things have become more challenging for brands. How can we engage our audience better? How can we get our posts read by many people?

At RankHigher, we have been working with few clients on their Facebook marketing strategies. Recently, one of the posts which we had created and had published for a client did extremely well. Imagine, for a one year old school in Bangalore, a post which gets over 2200 shares, all organically! And the post has reached nearly 200,000 people on Facebook! Isn’t that more than what a one year old brand can aspire for.

We decided to dig deeper to find out what could have triggered this “virality”. Here is what we think are the possible reasons:

Find the Hook – This is the most important aspect of your post. You have to find the hook of your audience. What really catches on with your readers? Can the post trigger a strong sentiment? Every brand needs to find the hook. And stronger the hook, the better the response. A positive sentiment, which triggers the happiness hormones in the body seem to do better than the ones which trigger negativity. In this case, the hook seemed to be around the parent child relationship. This is one relationship which will always evoke strong sentiment.

Easy to Follow Lists – Lists are a perennial hit amongst bloggers. Every content marketer will tell you why writing Lists posts will always get more engagement than others. We believe this holds true even for a social media post that you create. Make the list really easy to follow for your users.

Fresh and Unique Perspective – Almost all the posts that you will see on social media will be a rehash of what you would have already seen before. Unless the post is unique, or never seen before, it is unlikely that it will get lots of engagement. This is what we call originality. A me-too post will barely get any engagement. So do your research and get some unique data into your posts.

Illustrations – Illustrations tend to get better engagement than actual photographs. This is what we have seen with our posts. And illustrations should be great!

Easy on the eye – Most of your users will be using Facebook on mobile. So ensure that your post is easy on the eye for your users. Too much of text, too big image sizes or bad color combination can easily put off your users.

Keep Copywriting brief and to the point – Let your graphic do the topic. The copywriting should be concise enough to evoke the interest.

Mix up your boost posts and organic posts – We had boosted the previous post which was published a day before this post was published. A combination of boosted posts and organic posts published in tandem increases the overall reach of your organic posts. We have seen this phenomenon earlier as well.

Get your network to share your posts – This is crucial to build the initial momentum. A brand should get its network of followers, employees and business associates to share their posts. This gives the post wide exposure to a bigger set of people from where the probability of catching on increases.

What are the other things we learnt?

Trending Topics are not essential – This post was not based on a trending topic. Neither was there any seasonality associated. Therefore we believe seasonality or trending topics are not necessary to trigger virality.

Some people will always give negative feedback – We also learned that, there will some users who will give negative feedback. For this post we had 5 users who chose to hide all posts from the school. That is alright. Given, if we have to lose 5 people from a reach of nearly 200,000 people, that is not too bad a deal, right?

Here are the stats of the post I am talking about:

You can check the post here: https://www.facebook.com/schoolofindia/photos/a.616169661765925.1073741828.610563122326579/808534055862817

What do you think are the reasons behind this post receiving so much engagement? Do let us know below.