1. Images, everywhere

Whenever possible, use images to tell a story… We often put photos and charts directly into tweets, and almost everything we post on Facebook has an image.

From the fairly straightforward method of uploading images of fancy charts and graphs…

.. to the art of picking particularly arresting, colourful images, WSJ has a talent for using the right image for its Facebook audience.

In fact the WSJ photo desk spends a lot of time either sourcing great images or creating bespoke ones especially for the post, rather than just using whatever image happens to be embedded in the article.

It’s certainly worth spending time thinking about this, and that’s where social media automation can let you down. A random image can be uploaded, with odd cropping or unfortunate segmentation. This is particularly true of twitter, where the letterbox snippet can be particularly destructive.

Here’s another tip, and it’s one that’s found within Facebook’s own best practice guideline, the Facebook news feed algorithm loves images. If you upload an image to a page, this is far more likely to be seen than just a link or a video embed.

2. Post things that will engage a mobile audience

The majority of our social audience is coming to us on a mobile device… Post incredible stats, something that will really tell us about the world today, rather than just breaking news stories.

Although the above post has a link to the full article, it works as an interesting piece of ‘news’ in its own right. It’s a fun little bit of trivia, it’s relatable, it’s on-trend with the upcoming series of Game of Thrones. Also it’s an original and large sized image

Mobile optimisation means the right size, the right amount of information and the right formatting. Nobody likes pinching and swiping endlessly.

3. Design posts to be shared, not just read

I think the more you give people a taste of what they’re going to get and what you want them to talk about, the more they will talk about it.

This is a great tease for an interesting article and the image is perfectly optimised for Twitter. The key is revealing just enough information to not give away too many surprises, but also not just solely blurting out the headline. Chances are that’s in the URL anyway.

Curating the right ‘sharable’ content is an artform in itself. Although somethings are a no-brainer. Who the heck isn’t going to share this little guy?

4. A human touch really matters

Have editors write all your social content and make sure you’re replying to tweets and regularly asking questions of your audience based around the news.

WSJ was the first to break the story of Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s death on 2 February and during the course of the evening the WSJ website experienced major technical difficulties.

Heron and other reporters claim to have answered as many of the thousands of users’ questions as they possibly could within a fairly small window of time, and did so from their personal Twitter accounts.

Although I would criticise the fact that WSJ doesn’t seem to engage with its Twitter followers and Facebook commenters as the above above quote suggests. There’s very little engagement to be found scrolling through the last two weeks of output.

It seems WSJ has nailed how to broadcast effectively on social media, but isn’t quite practicing what it preaches yet on the ‘human touch’.

WSJ does regularly use Facebook as canvas for opinion.

This post prompted 46 comments, 179 shares and 465 likes, so the ‘surveying’ Facebook post is something not to be sniffed at.

5. Become a Facebook ‘scientist’

Make it your business to be on top of every tweak in the algorithm and change your strategy accordingly, in real time.

Well, this gets trickier every day. It’s not really possible to predict what will ‘work’ in terms of audience reach, but Facebook has recently revealed in its news feed changes that posts from Facebook pages will be given low priority in the new algorithm.

That still doesn’t mean that you should give up with it though, you just have to become savvier and indulge in a little more trial and error when it comes to formatting posts, picking the right time of day and optimising copy and images.

No matter what the changes, if people are engaging with your page, your posts will still appear in their news feeds. It’s a just a tougher competition now.

For more from us on brands winning on social media, check out how Oreo owns social media and how Samsung owns social video