With the Facebook IPO imminent, it’s no coincidence that Facebook has been whipping itself into a business-friendly shape. To that end, Facebook began to update Facebook Studio, the website that allows marketers to develop their Facebook campaigns and compare them with others. Less than a month ago, Facebook released a demo tool for Facebook Studio that allows marketers to preview their ads by showing how the placement will look on a real Facebook page.

Now, Facebook is helping marketers on the site with its “measuring success” series of blog posts. Today on the Facebook Studio blog, the company is revealing the results of a small study it conducted into brand engagement. From the blog post:

To better understand what makes a successful Page post, we recently conducted an internal study to discover which topics generate the most engagement. The study shows that speaking about subjects related to your brand is the best way to generate engagement. While the conclusion may not seem surprising, since your fans liked your Page because they like your brand, understanding how post topics relate to engagement can help you improve your content strategy and identify the best content to promote through Ads and Sponsored Stories.

Their study separated posts by brands into three categories: messages about the brand, messages related to the brand, and unrelated messages. Splitting the posts into those categories also enabled Facebook to determine what marketers should do to derive different outcomes from their posts. Facebook states that posts related to the brand, but not specifically about the brand, were the “sole universally significant predictor of all types of engagement.”

As for what works for each type of engagement aside from brand-related posts, Facebook had some tips on that too. If marketers want the posts to be widely shared, Facebook suggests using media such as photos and videos in the post. Getting users to “Like” a post is a matter of giving readers a “clear call to action.” In other words, requesting that the reader “Like” the post. Generating comments is most easily done by asking questions in a post.

Small, common sense, tips to be sure, but ones that could help your brand grow on Facebook.