A handy list of do’s and don’ts, for achieving social media success in 2016.

1. Don’t rely on organic reach.

It should be no shock that organic reach on Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk is on a steady decline. When developing social media content, and planning your social media marketing campaigns, it’s crucial that you set aside budget for promoting that content. To succeed, social media content must reach the right users, at the right time, and with the right message. Facebook (and now Instagram) offer unprecedented targeting parameters for online advertisements. You want to hit the 1,000 people outside Omaha who eat Oreos, watch Supergirl, listen to Kanye and spent money online in the past 30 days? You got it, dude. Set aside part of your production budget, to promote the content you’re creating. You’ve spent time and money crafting a story; it should be told the right way.

I’ve noticed an interesting trend among social media marketers lately: they are trying to cram more and more content into each social post. I thought it was common knowledge (not to mention commons sense) that shorter captions tend to perform better on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. I’ve always tried to hold myself to conveying one idea and one idea only in each post. This trend came into focus for me last week in a meeting where the client was actually advocating for paragraph-long captions on their Instagram posts in order to “convey the full story.” I was dumbstruck. But I’m always willing to challenge my own assumptions so we dug into our initial research on optimal post length to make sure we hadn’t missed anything.

We here at Pandemic Labs are big fans of The Nerdist. Using the Watchtower Analytics platform, we took a hard look at their Facebook Page. View the infographic here, and read below to see what we found.

The Nerdist posts a lot of links. Many of those are Facebook posts announcing the release of a new episode of The Nerdist Podcast. That’s cool, guys. But consider posting a single photo (Of the guest? Of the scene while recording?) and linking to the new episode from the image’s caption. Your EdgeRank will improve, and your clickthroughs will follow suit.

Weekend posts from The Nerdist Facebook Page result in proportionally higher interaction numbers than posts on other days of the week. Don’t spam people with too much weekend content, but time your weekend posts so that you’re hitting folks at the right times. Finding those times depends on where in the world your Fans are. People the world over use Facebook at generally the same times. Those are: “before work”, “around lunch” and “after dinner / kids are put to bed”.

In previous blog posts, strategies for the development and deployment of smart Facebook fan acquisition campaigns have been outlined. In this post, we’re going to look at two houses, both alike in dignity. Using Watchtower Analytics, we analyzed the Facebooking of the two biggest comic book publishers out there. Here’s what we found.

Both brands lean heavily on the 12:00 pm Eastern posting time. This suggests a mechanical schedule that isn’t optimized for the times at which each brand receives proportionally higher engagement, as detailed below.

Both brands are neglecting the peak engagement times, as reported by Watchtower’s data. Note that on the infographic, we’re using GMT -4 when commenting on times of day. DC is posting most frequently on Wednesdays (for those that don’t know, that’s when new comics are released for sale each week), and Marvel posts primarily on Fridays (a less-than-stellar day in terms of engagement metrics)

Looks like you’re enjoying an extra 2.5 million interactions this month thanks to that NFC Championship win. The extra interactions brought your engagement rate up from a somewhat respectable 0.70% to a whopping 1.59%.

You’re approaching the Super Bowl and Facebook Page dominance, but there are still a few areas where you can improve. Most notably the timing of your content. Take a look at the graph below.