While it isn’t the 140 characters of the Twitter structure, a Facebook post is not an opportunity to tell a long story. There are many good reasons for this:

• People are busy and/or have short attention spans and won’t read it
• You don’t own the Facebook page but you own your website; posting only on Facebook means your website isn’t seeing any traffic
• Unless it’s a baby dancing or laughing (or both) or there’s an unusual animal friendship involved, people will be hard-pressed to pay attention to an overlong post

This doesn’t mean that small business owners can’t use Facebook to their advantage. Here are some practical ways to get some Facebook love for your posts!

Short & Sweet

As I pointed out above, people have short attention spans – on Facebook, they seem to be even shorter. Avoiding overlong posts increases your chances of engaging your audience. Keep Facebook posts short, sweet and conversational in order to build relationships.

While Facebook is good for interaction, remember that you don’t own that space. Use this social media outlet as a tool to build credibility and direct users to your website, which is space and content that you DO own.

Ask Focused Questions

I think it’s a fair assumption that your audience wants to enjoy your content and interact with you or they wouldn’t be on Facebook. One way to allow people to do this is to invite them to answer questions. They don’t need to be complicated questions, and can have something to do with your products or services, current events, or an opinion. Keep in mind, however, to ask one question at a time per post.

Request an Easy Response

Instead of a simple question, consider a prompt like, “What I like best about Valentine’s Day is ________” and challenge your audience to provide a one-word answer. Since these types of questions take just a little time and are fun to answer, they tend to get a higher level of response than other types of posts.

Use Photos!

While a cliche, a picture really is worth a thousand words. With the growing popularity of Instagram and Pinterest, photos have become a valuable way to share inspiration, thoughts, beliefs, quotes and simple images with your audience. If you have a Pinterest account, you can easily leverage it for your small business and link it with your Facebook page so that whatever you “Pin” will show up on your Timeline and in others’ newsfeeds.

It’s hard to know what will go viral next, but chasing that elusive status will waste your time and resources into what social media is for – building relationships!