Facebook page likes do not define a campaign, but they certainly help.

Dan Zarrella of Hubspot recently sifted through 1.3 million posts on the top 10,000 Facebook pages and compiled some insights into what characteristics correlated with higher or lower engagement numbers:

• Posts with photos received the most Likes and Shares, while posts with text only received a slightly higher number of Comments.
• Posts that were either very short (less than 100 characters) or very long (400 or more characters) had a higher Like percentage, while longer posts tended to get more Shares.
• Posts with a high number of self-referential words, like “I” and “me” also tended to get more Likes.
• Negative posts tended to get more comments than positive posts.
• Content posted later in the day, around 8 p.m. EST, received more Likes, while Shares peaked at 6 p.m. EST. Posts published on the weekend received more Likes than posts during the business week.

Of course, these findings do not necessarily mean you should only post photos at 8 p.m. on Saturday. The key is to explore how broad insights like these can be applied to your specific Facebook strategy. Taking a closer a look at the data provided by Facebook for your page(s) (called Facebook Insights) will give you a sense of what tactics are currently the most effective, and how practices like those above can be used to supplement them – not replace them.