Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. I am not saying facebook the company is stupid, I am saying that everything on facebook kinda is. Now don’t get me wrong, some very smart things happen in the news feed, groups, messages, and chats, but overall when you think about 99% of the things that get comments, likes, or shares are stupid. So let’s go over some examples how facebook is stupid.
Pictures rule because reading is for smarty pants
A favorite of ours recently has been the success of images across all social networks. You know you’re on pinterest or have looked, you have an instagram account, and maybe even 3 or 4 other photo filtering apps on your iPhone. On facebook the stupid pictures rule, and always will. SocialMediaToday.com has some 65,000 fans and posts all kinds of cool and educating content, but when they get stupid they have their highest engagement rates. For example this picture is one of their most engaged images of all time on their fan page.
Video dominates because we are too lazy to read what you have to say
Even though what you have to say is super cool, and you’re a great writer, I won’t waste my time reading your article. If you post it as a video to your news feed and it is less than a minute long and funny, I might listen. This is the general consensus of the normal facebook user, and if I wasn’t writing in a blog you wouldn’t be reading this.
Fill in the blanks
Go ahead fill in the ________ with whatever you ________. See what comes out, and you might just earn your fan page some heavy engagement. We all like to play a game, be creative and even get stupid. Some of the blanks will get filled in with cool and clever blanks when many others will get random and profane substitutions. Either way fill in the blanks is one of the most engaging type of posts or campaigns we do to increase engagement and edgerank scores. See how Century Tuna used it in a custom tab to help make their page viral with over 400 comments.
Best caption wins!
There is no real prize, there is a real competition though. By combining the popularity of pictures and fill in the blanks you get a post full of engagement. We do this on our fan page a lot (fb.com/tabbedco) to increase engagement, but also to make ourselves laugh. Facebook isn’t a place to be taken seriously, so we take advantage of the stupid level as much as possible. This post garnered us likes and comments from fans we never even knew we had.
