In a recent article we covered important changes on social networks over the past year. To address some of these changes, we worked on improving the way Inboundli helps to optimize social posts.

Revamped Optimization Suggestions

For starters, we updated the score calculation in the success bar that indicates how well your post is optimized. The new success bar better reflects the current best practices on social media and scores are calculated in a unique way for each social network.

For example, we suggest adding Hashtags on Facebook but won’t lower the score if you don’t use any. However, the score is lowered if you use too many hashtags – a practice that lowers engagement. On Twitter, on the other hand, we do lower the score for not using hashtags because they play a more significant role in your content’s visibility.

We also changed the way we look at annotation lengths. Rather than suggesting an optimal number of characters, we recommend an optimal number of words. Based on our research, we concluded that annotations with 6-9 words performed the best.

inboundli evaluates only the text in your annotation and will not count mentions, additional hashtags or links. If your post has less than 6 words, the score will be progressively lower with every missing word. However, having more than 9 words does not affect the score since longer annotations can still be effective.

New Way to Append Hashtags in Tweets

On September 19th, Twitter announced that it no longer counts photos, videos, GIFs, polls and Quote Tweets towards the 140-character limit that is imposes on Tweets.

This means that Tweets have more room for annotating – which means you can put hashtags after your annotation and not inside of it. Having annotations clean of hashtags makes them more readable and your posts appear less spammy. Hashtags clustered at the end of a Tweet provide the benefit of additional reach without hurting engagement.

From now, hashtags in inboundli will by default go to the end of a Tweet. Should you run out of characters and still want more hashtags, only then will inboundli append them to the annotation text. This behavior will ensure that you have as little cluttering in your annotations as possible.

New Annotation Ideas for Twitter and Facebook

Over the course of 2016, two noticeable changes occurred in the way posts are being formatted:

Firstly, Emoji can be effective on Facebook and Twitter. However, we acknowledge that emoji aren’t for everyone just yet and if you’re having doubts about using them, you can address this in the “Stats” page.

We updated the Stats page to show emoji just as they appear on Twitter so you can easily spot them. From the dropdown labeled “Channel” select a competitor and sort their posts by “Total engagements”. You can now see whether your competitors use emoji in their top performing posts.

inboundli supports emoji and using one or two can increase your post’s visibility. If you’re on a Mac, emoji are built-in and you can follow this advice to use them. Similarly, on Windows 10 you can use emoji from the Touch Keyboard as described in this article. Windows 7 doesn’t have a keyboard with emoji but you can easily copy-paste emoji from this list.

When inserting emoji into an annotation in inboundli they appear in their default Unicode format. Once shared, the emoji will receive the appropriate (and colorful) style on Facebook and Twitter.

Secondly, companies started breaking texts over multiple lines to make posts taller. This has shown to increase visibility and you can skip lines on all the main social networks. When displaying texts over multiple lines, you should note that Facebook will hide the portion of the text that is longer than 3 lines behind a “See all” link.

This is also useful because it allows you to place links in a separate line, where they stand out and get more clicks. Furthermore, you can put hashtags in a separate line to give your post more structure and declutter the annotation. Simply press Enter to skip lines in inboundli.

Here's an example of a Tweet spreading over multiple lines and includes an emoji:

Summary

We dedicated the end of 2016 to research changes and update the posting functionality in inboundli. The new features will ensure that social posts are compatible with the most effective tactics and will help to grow engagement in 2017. To learn about what else makes your posts sucessful, read our article about the best practices for social posting. And, as always, stay tuned for exciting new features!