How to make your posts stand out on the Web: The complete guide to social media formatting
This post originally appeared on the Buffer blog.
Social media is a crowded place. You need every competitive advantage possible to stand out.
Luckily, giving your social media posts a little something extra doesn’t have to mean to a lot of extra work for you.
In this post, we’ll go over some simple tricks and best practices of social media formatting to help you create unique, stand-out posts on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest, along with some tools to help you create memorable blog tidbits worth sharing.
Let’s get started!
Stand out on Twitter
Offering just 140 characters and a very short shelf life, Twitter may be the most challenging medium to stand out on.
Here are a few ways to make the most of your tweets.
Symbols and emoticons
Adding symbols like ♥✩♬♡►♪☺♫ to your tweets isn’t just fun – it can also make your tweets shorter and easier to read. The Wall Street Journal even uses Twitter symbols to add bar charts to its tweets.
To get started using the more than 109,000 symbols available, head over to our Ultimate Guide to Adding Cool Symbols to Your Tweets.
Keep it short
Tweets get more traction when there’s a little room to spare – shoot for 120-130 characters.
Add value with photos
Buffer’s research on Twitter posts with photos versus without indicates that photo posts vastly outperform non-photo posts in terms of both clicks and shares.
Tweets with images received 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites and 150% more retweets.
And according to HubSpot research, photo posts bring in 55% more leads, as well.
Next: Stand out on Facebook