A quick gloss over my news feed shows me that the posts that receive the most likes, shares, and comments on Facebook are the ones that do at least one of these following things:

• have a picture
• keep the words minimal
• have a call to action (ask a question, like vs. share, fill in the blank, caption this)
• say or show something funny/controversial (would stay away from controversial though)
• along with these others

What this tells us is that in order for people to actively participate and engage with content, they must be lightly provoked. With the ability now to open and view multiple tabs at once on laptops, tablets, and smartphones, our attention spans have decreased. The itch to constantly keep up with the content that we are continually flooded with non-stop has transformed so that we now live in a “generation of internet consumers live in a world of “instant gratification and quick fixes” which leads to a “loss of patience and a lack of deep thinking.” As a result of this decreased attention span, many people browsing the internet now just look for this quick fix via shorter posts and images. Because of this, websites like 9GAG and Buzzfeed, along with their Facebook pages, have able to thrive in terms of the numbers of likes, shares and comments on the content they post. They understand that people respond to and want to look at images, short titles, and funny/informing/or controversial things.

This knowledge that shows we are less capable of staying focused on one thing for a long time on social media combined with the data that shows users engage more with content that follow the criteria listed above, among others, such as using emoticons and participating in contests, leads us to the following conclusion: For anyone on Facebook, whether they’re posting through their personal page, a hobby/for-fun page, or a professional, business page, to get more engagement, use pictures, keep the words to a minimum, and pose a question or ask for opinions.

To illustrate, I will use the Facebook fitness page “DoYouEven.com”. In the picture below, you can see that the two posts are only a day apart and posted by the same owner, but that the one that was posted a day later received far more attention and got more engagement. Although both posts have a picture, the difference here is that the post on the left is too wordy and not funny or controversial.