What We Learned from Our Top-Performing Social Media Posts

Author: Emily Copp / Source: Hootsuite Social Media Management

When you’re struggling to come up with new, exciting social content, it’s helpful to look back at your “North Star”—a past post that was really successful.

By understanding what went well and why, you can set guidelines that will help you consistently produce high-performing content.

We chatted with our social team about Hootsuite’s top-performing social posts, and they gave us some lessons on how to create awesome content every day.

7 lessons from our top-performing social media posts

1. Keep the copy short

Writing for social media is no different than any other form of copywriting—being concise is more difficult than it seems.

When dealing with complex topics, there’s a tendency to over-explain or oversell. And while that’s okay for a first draft, our social team spends a lot of time distilling concepts into a single sentence or idea.

Keeping headlines short is better for click-throughs and shares. For example, in our social apps post, the copy that accompanied the link was super short—only five words—but extremely effective. It got nearly 200 reactions and 74 shares.

2. Honor the content

We don’t reinvent the wheel every time we write social copy, especially when sharing content that has been optimized for clicks and shares. Instead, we try and honor the spirit of the existing title or opening paragraph if it’s a blog post—making a few small tweaks to better suit the channel.

We don’t rewrite copy for the sake of creating something new.

For example, when we shared a blog post on the do’s and don’ts of hashtags, we made a minor change by shortening the title. It performed extremely well, earning 1,625 link clicks.

3. Use numbers

List-style blog posts perform well. Our audience can quickly scan them to find the content that is most relevant to them and then move on.

If you’re sharing a listicle, always use the numeral in your social copy, like we did in our post on 8 writing resources to help you create content. It’s easier for your audience to scan and consume.
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