Top Performing Facebook Posts of 2023 - Amplify Your TpT Income

Here are the top posts on Facebook from 2023. Let’s look at them and see what we can learn about going viral.

1) Wisdom about your Old Drying Machine

Source: https://www.facebook.com/groups/homegardendiy/posts/1358870471385257/

This is a Facebook Group called Home Garden DIY with 1.3M members

Stats: 52 millions views, 525k likes, 21k comments, 162k shares

2) This is Not a Stick Up!

Source: facebook.com/343555188026471

This is a Facebook Page called Prison Meals which has over 200k followers

Stats: 46 millions views, 821k likes, 21k comments, 103k shares

3) Don’t let the Ants Take Over

Source: facebook.com/322297606855549

This is from a Facebook page called Funny Humour Crazy which has 79k followers

Stats: 45M views, 2.1M likes, 40k comments, 276k shares

4) It’s Not Blood, it’s Delicious

Source: facebook.com/701631465337716

This image was posted by Foody Rahul, a page with 693k followers.

It appeared with the words, “only 90’s kids will know”

Just in case you’re wondering, from what I’ve gather in the comments, this is a type of plant that kids in non-American and non-European countries turn into a sweet.

5) Oh to be Young Again

Stats: 41.2M views, 322k likes, 83k comments, 8.6k shares

Sources: https://facebook.com/676439850687864

This is a Reel from Lab4Success, an IG page with less than 10,000 followers.

In this Reel, three people, who appear in their 30’s or 40’s, stand in a large puzzle and cheer for cars to drive through the puzzle and splash them. That’s it, it’s nothing spectacular.

6) He’s Getting Away, but He’s also Not Under Arrest

Stats: 43M views, 1.4M likes, 6.1k comments, 145k shares

Source: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1061327055030630

This Reel is from an IG page whose handle is NurseLoveOfficial, a travel ICU nurse who tries to post funny content about the profession. He boasts 174k followers.

In the video, the man who is being escorted by police officers while (apparently) wearing nurse scrubs, suddenly takes off running and they all chase him, even though he was supposedly never under arrest to begin with.

7) Fun in the Nursing Home

Stats: 42M views, 782k likes, 10k comments, 152k shares

From MetDeanTips, a magazine page with 14M followers.

This video shows two people in a nursing home playing a game made of cardboard and ballpit balls.

Stats: 136M views, 2.4M likes, 120k comments

This video is not a Reel, though it’s only 90 seconds long, so it could be. It also has much more views than the others, but was also posted long before they were. So in time, they could catch up to it.

Take Aways

What Your Posts Should Do

Remember that our Social Media content is top of funnel. That means it should be drawing people into your sales funnel by creating engagement, sparking curiosity, or adding value. Your goal is to turn viewers into fans and subscribers.

80% of your social media posts should be for engagement. This means they make people feel something, they start a conversation, or they add value.

The Drying Machine posts did so well because it gave a useful tip to the audience that could hopefully help them make some money. The nursing home posts did so well because it was creative, and it also was heart warming. The Bloody Sweet Posts did well because it created curiosity (it also connected with people who did eat that sweet growing up. For them, it was nostalgia.) The adults playing in the puddles asked a question and got people talking. The Florida Man post made people laugh.

Your posts need to do one of the above if you want to grow your audience.

What Makes a Post Go Viral?

I love How Gary Vanyerchuk answers this question in his book, Crushing It. I’m summarizing, but he basically says, you never know. But one thing he does recommend is that your post be native to the platform. It should look like the other posts on Facebook (or whatever social media outlet you’re using).

I’ve spent hours working on a post that I thought would do amazingly well, only to have it totally bomb. And I’ve had posts go crazy viral that I was not expecting. It’s hard to know what’s going to catch fire and take off. But I do notice that there is normally some commonalities amongst the posts that make it.

Did you notice none of the best performing posts were really long, in depth videos? Because that’s not what does well on Facebook, that does well on YouTube.

Most of the posts were image posts, and the rest were short videos. Most were simple, easy to understand, and not that deep.

Were we Sold a Pack of Lies about Reels?

At the beginning of 2023 we were told that Reels would be where it was at. They would get better reach than most of your posts, which in turn would grow your business. When marketers across the globe were surveyed, they consistently told us that they were investing heavily into Reels in 2023.

Well, we just looked at 7 of the best performing posts of 2023 and only two were Reels. One was a video that was short enough to be a Reel, but it was posted as a video. And 4 were image posts!

Even more shocking to me that was all of these posts had pages of at least 75,000 followers except for one. Several were close to half a million followers, and one was inside a group with over a million followers. Then. there was the one of the adults playing in a puddle. That page only had 10,000 followers! And it was a business page, not an individual’s.

Why is this shocking to me? Well, if you’ve had a post go viral, you know that your page will have a growth spike in the number of followers it has. You are able to send an invite to every new person who likes the post to follow your page. So I’m quite confident that the size of these pages had much to do with the fact that they had a post that was viewed tens of millions of times.

Except for one!

Even though it was viewed 40 million times and had 322,000 likes, the page still has a relatively small amount of followers.

I’m starting to wonder if these Reels are not converting into followers, and that we’ve all been drinking the Kool-Aid. I personally spent a lot of time making Reels for my business and did not see any strong statistics that led me to believe it was worth the time and energy invested into them.

Some Final Reminders

Facebook is supposed to be fun. Make your posts engaging, entertaining, or heart warming.

Use your platform to turn viewers into fans, and then suck them into your sales funnel. Ideally, you’re pulling them into your email list where you start to sell to them.

You never know what’s going to take off. So post a lot of great stuff. Eventually, something will catch fire.