Ah, Facebook. Both the #1 social network and the biggest pain in Marketer’s butts. It really has become that “can’t live with it, can’t live without it” social media tool.

The key to Facebook (beyond throwing money at it), is to try to get your engagement up. Likes, comments and shares on your posts will help to drive that, so it’s something to strive for. Today’s infographic helps you to sort out what to post and what not to post to Facebook, for maximum engagement.

1. Stop talking about yourself! Use the 80/20 rule: 80% of your content should not be directly about you. It should be related, in some way, to your business, but only 20% of your content should be directly about you. The rest should provide value and be interesting and engaging. Direct selling is not encouraged.

2. Ask questions. People love to give their opinion, and speak from their area of expertise. Plus, asking questions engages and involves your audience. Think of it as a date: would you go on a second date with someone who never asked you a question all night? Nope, you wouldn’t.

3. Keep it short. Simply put, we don’t have long attention spans any more. Keep your updates really short, under 80 characters if possible, and include a photo or upload a video for maximum results.

4. Don’t post too much. I’ve been reading tons of blog posts by people that say they are posting 9 times a day to Facebook, but I think that’s way too much. It must be working for them, because they’re doing it, but what a huge amount of work! For many of the pages I manage, we post 2-3 times a day, spaced out over the course of the day. It’s easy enough to figure out the best times of the day to post in your Insights, and FB’s scheduler makes it easy to queue stuff up in advance.

5. Don’t ignore comments–especially negative ones. Make sure you respond to comments and questions quickly, and don’t delete negative comments–respond to them publicly, and then solve the issue privately.

Infographic courtesy of Vertical Response.