As Facebook expands with its pricey acquisitions, small businesses and emerging brands are still simply trying to optimize their Facebook pages as an effective marketing tool. Dan Zarrella, HubSpot’s in-house Social Media Scientist and author of The Social Media Marketing Book, recent research offers some scientific insight to for those still growing. Zarrella created a database of over 1.3 million Facebook posts published on 10,000 most popular pages to identify characteristics of posts that generate the most likes, comments and shares.  Zarrella’s research suggests that the type, length and language, as well as time of day and day of week of posts, influence social engagement.

The most engaging post type overall (in terms of likes, comments and shares) is photo, followed by text, video and links.  However, text tends to generate more comments, specifically.  Larger posts received the most shares while posts that were either very short or very long tended to have more likes.

Language is also important to attracting engagements.  Posts using self-referential wording including “I” and “me,” received more likes than those that did not.  Neutral comments had fewer likes while very negative posts tended to receive more comments than positive posts.

Content posted later in the day (Eastern time) tended to get more likes and shares with “likes [peaking] around 8pm, while share peak earlier around 6pm.”  According to the study, posts published on Saturdays and Sundays are more likely to get attention than those posted during the business week.

Of course, for all this data science, social media engagement is also an art that must be tailored to the nature of the brand the page reflects.  For more information on utilizing Facebook as a brand development and marketing tool, check out guru Amy Porterfield’s website.  Visit Zarrella’s site to view the complete infographic.