How to get more comments, likes and shares on Facebook [Infographic]

If you’re the type of person whose happiness levels go up and down in sync with your Facebook page’s analytics, this infographic may be your new best friend. Social media scientist Dan Zarrella crunched the numbers and churned out a guide to what works well on Facebook and what doesn’t — at least for the 10 000 most liked pages on the social network.

Not one for brightly coloured charts and line graphs? I’ll summarise. You should be posting more photos. Overall, Facebook users engage the most with images. They ‘like’ and share photos more than any other type of post, and photos come a close second to text in terms of the number of comments per post. So if you want to get more responses from your Facebook fans, you need to stop posting so many links (they’re the least popular type of post) and start sharing more photos.

But it’s not just the content you have to think about; the time and day you share media on Facebook can influence the ‘success’ of your content before you even hit the post button. Posts on weekends tend to receive more ‘likes’ and the rate of shares increases steadily throughout the day, but takes a nose dive after 6pm. Interestingly, the equivalent is not true for Twitter: users tend to get the most retweets on Fridays, and the lowest number of retweets on Saturdays and Sundays. Of course, some of these finding are difficult to implement if your Facebook fans live in different timezones (6pm for one may be early morning for another), but it’s still worth experimenting to see if your posts garner more reactions at various times of the day.

Infographic courtesy of Dan Zarrella