At times it feels like Facebook has been part of our lives forever, yet its business pages are only three years old. A new study by Buddy Media reveals which posts by companies attract the most response giving some useful information for businesses wanting to drive Facebook Fan engagement.

Here is a summary of the report’s findings:

Best time to post: 20.00-07.00 – out of work hours, people take more time to ‘like’ and comment.

Post on Wednesdays – Wednesday, followed by Sunday, came out as the best days to post for engagement.

Limit daily posts –  one or two posts a day results in a 40 percent higher engagement rate compared with posting more than three times a day.

Post one to four times a week – for retail brands, posting one to four times a week produces 71 percent higher user engagement than five or more posts.

Short posts work best – posts with less than 80 characters receive 66 percent higher engagement than longer posts, with those with between one and 40 characters prompting the most activity (86% more!).

Questions get fans talking – questions generate more than double the amount of comments than non-question posts.

Best structure: fill in the blank – brand posts employing a fill in the blank strategy (e.g. I like…) generate comment rates nine times higher than other posts, yet less than 1 percent of retail brands use this tactic.

Money speaks – when posting about a special offers, even small amounts of money off generates more interest than percentage discounts.

Text only posts are best – Status posts that contain only words receive 94 percent higher engagement than average. The next best post is a single photo with simple text.

What to know more? Download the full report from the Buddy Media website >

Melitta