What’s working on Facebook Pages

Ahhh, Facebook, the old dinosaur of social media. So many online creators dismiss it in favor of newer, shinier platforms, but it’s still our top source of social media traffic.

Here’s what’s currently working on our Facebook Page.

Experimenting is key

It used to be that we would just publish link posts on Facebook and hope that the traffic would roll in, but it’s not necessarily that easy to do anymore, especially since Facebook prefers posts that keep people on their platform.

What is absolutely necessary is experimenting with all types of posts and seeing what works.

Here are some different styles of Facebook posts to try.

Link posts with short captions

Let’s start with link posts since I mentioned that style already.

It’s not that this kind of post doesn’t work at all, but it does require some experimentation with frequency and style of caption to optimize it.

What’s working for us:

• Using this style of post along with a few other styles to mix it up
• Very short captions with emojis that ask a question or make a little comment on the topic. Emma Cruises does a fantastic job of this on her Facebook Page.

Text-only posts with link in first comment

While a plain text post won’t likely do much for you, a text post that’s on a darker background works really well for many people on Facebook these days, including us.

The IFLScience Facebook Page uses this style often.

What’s working for us:

• White text on a dark background
• When the text is a question, it gets good engagement from users who want to answer it in the comments
• I create text posts that ask a question that corresponds to an article where we have some answers. I put that article as the first comment and many people will click from there.
• There are almost no social media scheduler tools that allow the background color behind the text, so I create these kinds of posts directly on Facebook.

Photos with link in caption

While a link post is a post where Facebook pulls in all of the information about your link, a photo post focuses on the photo itself and the link is only in the caption.

Reels with link in first comment

We are living in a short video world now, including on Facebook.

These can be fantastic for reach and you might even make money if you have Reels monetization available in your account.

The Bucket List Lists Facebook Page uses this style almost exclusively.

What’s working for us:

• Although I create short videos to post on Instagram and TikTok, I don’t share them all on our Facebook Page. You’ll have to see what works for you, but not all styles do well on Facebook.
• I’ve learned that educational Reels do the best for us, so I only share those on our Facebook Page, with a link in the first comment to a related article.

Memes/funny posts

When you entertain people, it’s great for engagement.

This style won’t lead to clicks, but it’s great to occasionally throw in between the link-focused posts.

What’s working for us:

• Using familiar meme styles to create a version that works for our niche
• Finding funny GIFs and coming up with a caption that people who follow will relate to

Creating a posting plan

It’s all fine and good to see the different kinds of posts, but how do you get it everything set up without it taking up your time?

You could use Facebook’s own scheduler if you want, but most of us who run online businesses use third-party tools to make it easier.

After trying literally dozens of tools, I keep ending up back at SmarterQueue which is full of features at an affordable price.

It allows you to create categories for posts, a schedule for when that content goes out, and then makes it easy to queue up content to post again later.

I created my categories based on types of posts as we discussed above.

• Reels with link in first comment
• Link posts with short caption
• Photo posts with link in caption
• Etc.

The reason I like setting up categories like this is because it makes experimenting with different kinds of posts much easier.

Photo posts with link in the caption not working anymore? I can delete that category or reduce the frequency.

Certain kind of post working really well? Add more slots to the schedule for that category.

Once the posts are published, I check a few times a week to see how each one did.

If it does well, I’ll requeue it to post again later.

If certain types of posts don’t work well at all, I’ll delete the category completely and try something else.

the results

With a posting frequency of about 4/day, we’ve seen a consistent 10% of our traffic from Facebook.

I know there are sites that rely almost exclusively on Facebook for traffic, so I’m hoping we might be able to increase that a bit over time.

what’s working for you?

Is there a strategy or type of post that’s working for you? Would love to hear about it and give it a try.