Facebook’s native cross-posting option is ugly as hell. Here’s how to get more engagements on Twitter for your Facebook posts.
What you’ll need:
- An appropriate preview image for your link or article.
- A permalink.
Facebook’s native cross-posting system – the system that posts events and other Facebook pages from Facebook to your Twitter page as a Tweet – does not work flawlessly with Twitter.
The best way to post about an event or page on Facebook is to make a post about it yourself rather than using Facebook’s share option. You need to make sure that your page is optimized for mobile, as 85% of Twitter users access Twitter from a mobile device. If your post looks uninteresting or doesn’t convey relevant information, you won’t get nearly as many clicks.
For Twitter, that means the ideal image size for your posts (as of this writing, since 2017) is 1024 x 512, as that’s the size that best displays on mobile.
Sidenote: All posts on Twitter should have an image whenever possible, but the image itself shouldn’t be essential to understand the image. It should be expected that all professional organizations and brands use alt text for their images, to ensure they can be interpreted by the blind via a screen reader. Here’s a guide by Twitter on how to add alt text to your images.
Twitter will automatically shorten or lengthen all links for you to 23 characters through the t.co link shortener, giving you more room to concentrate on engaging copy. 257 characters, exactly.
For events:
Your copy should answer the following questions: what, when, and where. Due to the limited character count, you may have to get creative with how you describe your event. Remember the goal is to link people to your page, not convey all of the information through Twitter.
Sample description:
In this case, longer words (like “chicken”) are replaceable with emojis that can be read by the screen reader and understood contextually. The image is relevant and commands the reader’s attention. Information relevant to people who are interested in attending the event is all there In the course of this tweet, we can ask the question – “is my schedule clear to pick up a new chicken friend at Knuckleberry Farms and support Monkey Helpers?” – and receive an answer to that question.
It was a challenge to fill the space Twitter provided for me. I still had 14 characters left. You can include information that’s relevant to your event, such as special requirements or ticket locations. The world is your oyster.
The work that it took to produce this style of Tweet is far more informative than what Facebook generates, and is far more likely to generate engagement.
Ben Valin has run Phoenix Collective as an informal charitable group since 2014, starting with providing transgender students free clothing and binders at FAU’s Multicultural Center. Since then, he provides social media management training for young LGBT+ professionals at no cost to them with the goal of providing them with a cutting edge above their peers. If you learned something from this article, you can tip him and support his work through Ko-Fi.
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