The Perfect Post Checklist

Want to rock social media?

Follow this checklist of 10 practices to will ensure your posts are as effective as possible.

1. Pass the re-share test.

Every post you make should pass the re-share test. This means your post is so good that your followers like it enough to re-share it with their followers. This is the sincerest form of flattery. “Liking” a post is tipping a waiter at a restaurant; re-sharing a post is telling people to eat there.

2. Embrace the NPR model.

National Public Radio in America provides content that informs, inspires, and entertains. A few times a year, it runs a pledge drive that interrupts programming to ask for donations. The reason that people tolerate pledge drives, and often give money, is that NPR is so valuable.

If you want to use social media for marketing purposes, you need to post such great content that you earn the right to promote your product or service.

3. Be bold.

If you want to succeed on social media, you need to break through the noise. One way to do this is to be bold about the topics that you cover—so take a stand on the issues that are important to you!

If people don’t like what you post, they can unfollow you. Brands can’t get away with what people can, but companies like Salesforce.com and Apple are bold about issues such as gay rights.

4. Be brief.

I’ve never seen a post that was too short. Most posts are too long. Obviously Twitter has a 140-character limit, but posts for other platforms should be three to five sentences long. If you want to go longer, write a blog post and use social media to drive people to it. You have a few seconds to capture people’s attention—think Tinder, not eHarmony.

5. Link to sources.

One of the reasons you can be brief is that most social media posts involve curation—as opposed to creation. You’re acting as a filter and arbiter of taste to help people find existing great content.

The ethical and effective thing to do is to link to the source of your post to reward the creator and to provide a path for people to learn more.

6. Add a graphic.

The easiest thing you can do to attract more readers and to increase interaction is to add a graphic to every post. This simple act can double engagement.

Long before I became chief evangelist of Canva, I realized that the tool was an easy, simple, inexpensive, and legal way to add graphics to social media. We wanted the world be learn about Canva, so we created the lynda.com course Up and Running with Canva.

7. Use the optimal-size graphic.

While we’re on the topic of graphics, be sure that you use the optimal size for each platform. In a perfect world, all the platforms would support the same size graphics, but this isn’t a perfect world. Until then, you’ll have to create graphics for each service along these guidelines: Twitter (1024 x 512), Facebook (940 x 788), Pinterest (735 x 1100), Google+ (800 x 600), and Instagram (640 x 640).

(Canva actually provides templates for each of these services.)

8. Keep calm and post often.

The most common mistake made with social media is not posting frequently enough.

I make about 75 posts per day to my Twitter account. On my Facebook and Google+ accounts, I make 5 to 10 posts for each platform per day.

All of your readers are not awake at the same time—and even if they were, people’s content consumption habits are different.

I even repeat my tweets three times, eight hours apart, because this triples the amount of click-throughs. A few people will complain, but if you aren’t pissing off some people on social media, you’re not using it right.

9. Go native.

This is a tip for Facebook. My experience is that uploading video natively to Facebook results in triple the views compared to embedding a YouTube video on Facebook. If you were Facebook, would you promote native video or video of Google/YouTube, a competitor? This recommendation doubles your work—but I never said social media is easy.

10. Go "incognito."

Most browsers enable you to visit a website “incognito” or anonymously. This means you’re not all “cookied up”; the website can’t recognize or identify you and won’t automatically sign you into your accounts. It’s a great practice on social media because you can double-check how other people see your posts.

No one knows exactly how to create perfect posts, but you’ll get a lot closer if you constantly experiment. Change variables such as timing, length, graphics, and subject matter. So keep experimenting—and let me know at guy@canva.com what works for you, too!

Photo by Thomas Hawk for Stocksy

Check out other recent LinkedIn Influencer posts by Guy Kawasaki:

• Choosing an Advisor: Separate the Contenders from the Pretenders
• How to Establish Your Brand Message
• How to Be a Demo God

About: Guy Kawasaki is currently the chief evangelist of Canva and the former chief evangelist of Apple. He's the author of thirteen books including The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur — How to Publish a Book, What the Plus!, and Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Action. Guy shares enchanting stuff on the topics of marketing, enchantment, social media, writing, self-publishing, innovation and venture capital.

His latest book is The Art of the Start 2.0. (hardcover or Kindle)