Because of the seemingly random of nature of Facebook’s news feeds it can be very difficult to figure out why some things you post on the site get a lot of clicks and others are virtually ignored.

But, here’s five simple things that impact the likelihood that your Facebook posts get seen and shared.

1. The Engagement Level Of Your Previous Updates

The biggest thing that impacts whether your Facebook updates generate clicks is whether your updates are actually getting seen in your fans’ Facebook news feeds. I’ve written before about the shocking realities of how Facebook’s news feed algorithms work, and you’ll need to take this into account with all of your updates.

Simply put, the better a job you do at getting your fans to engage with your posts, the more likely your future posts are to appear in their news feeds. And the more your posts appear in their news feeds, the more likely they are to click on the links you post.

So, the most important thing you can do to get more clicks on your posts is to have built up a strong connection to your fans and a presence in their news feeds thanks to the success you’ve had in getting them to engage with your previous updates.

2. The Time You Post

Aside from getting your updates into people’s news feeds, the next most important thing to consider when you’re trying to get more clicks on your updates is to post them at the right time of day for your audience. It may take a little trial and error, but try to figure out when the majority of your fans are on Facebook and post your most important updates during those times – again, the more people that see them in the moment, the more clicks you will get.

In thinking about what time your fans are most likely to be on Facebook, consider whether your fanbase works or not, how old they are, what time zone they live in, and other basic factors that can help you estimate when they most likely use Facebook. And remember, it’s likely your schedule as a comedian doesn’t match up with their schedule as fans.

Just because you’re on Facebook at 1 am after a show doesn’t mean they are, so don’t waste a good post by posting it late at night when most of your fans will sleep through it.

3. Whether Or Not Your Link Has An Image Attached To It

When you post a link to something on Facebook, the site automatically pulls an image from the page you are linking to that it features along with your link. This is important because studies have shown that updates that include images get a lot more clicks than updates that don’t.

Again, this is automatically pulled by Facebook based on whatever images happen to exist on the website you’re linking to so there’s not much you can do to control it if there isn’t an image. However, if you’re linking to one of your own blog posts or content on a website that you can control, you want to make sure that you add an image to the post on your site so that there will be an image on the page for Facebook to pull into the link that you share. That much you can control and it will help you get more clicks to the link you share on Facebook.

4. The Title And Description Of The Link That You Post

When you share a link to a website or piece of content through Facebook, the social network automatically creates the title/description of the link based on whatever is on the website. However, you can easily change either the title or description, simply by highlighting the text and changing it before you post the update.

This is very easy to do and a great way to increase the clicks you get because most likely the title and description you will write for the piece of content will be more interesting and attention grabbing than whatever the default title and description is from the website. Keep in mind that anything goes in these sections, so even if you’re sharing a YouTube video you had nothing to do with creating, you can plug your own website in the description by saying something like “To see more awesome videos like this, check out MySite.com.”

And one more quick hint – if you use the full “http” url in the description, that will actually make it a clickable link in the description.

5. The Relevance Of What You Post To Your Audience

When you share links to content through your Facebook fan page, take a moment to think about whether what you’re sharing is actually relevant to your fans. In a perfect world, all your fans will be interested in everything you post, but in order to do that you need to make sure you’re posting things that are relevant to them.

For example, if you know you’ve got fans from across the country, don’t post an update promoting your local show to all of them because most of them aren’t going to be able to make it and won’t care anyway because it’s not relevant to them. You can select to post an update only to your fans who live in a specific city instead by using the Customize button that’s right next to the Share button on your update screen.

The same extends to content that you share – you may be interested in some inside-comedy industry article about the business of comedy, but will your fans be? Probably not. That’s the kind of thing you might share on your personal page as opposed to your fan page.

Again, there’s no hard rules about this but use your judgment and try to remember that the goal is to make everything you post on your Facebook fan page be relevant to the people that are following you. The more you do that, the more success you’ll have.