Surprising Results on Social Sharing Techniques [Infographic]

Does punctuation really matter on social media? What about using numbers and total word count? Actually, yes. Content marketing company Compendium recently conducted a study involving social sharing statistics from more than 200 business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. They were looking to determine best practices for social sharing and discovered differences between what worked for B2B and B2C firms. The study looked at factors such as punctuation, word count, time of day, and day of the week of posting.

Here are a few of the most interesting discoveries:

• Don’t use a question mark. This significantly reduces clickthrough on posts for consumers and businesses. Posts with question marks get between 25 and 52 percent fewer clicks than other posts.
• Keep it short and sweet. For all messages keep it below 25 words.
• Watch use of exclamation marks. They are effective on LinkedIn but not on Twitter.
• Include a hashtag (#) for B2B. These messages received 193% more clicks. Hashtags are not helpful for B2C.
• Numbers are effective for B2B tweets. They get 50% more clicks for B2B compared to only 3.5% for B2C.

See the infographic below for all the details!

What surprised you the most? What practices will you adopt/change based on this?