Don’t Worry About Facebook Likes, Improve Your Reach and Engagement
It’s common to get distracted by the wrong metrics. As an analytics expert, one of my rules is never trust a number that is not a percentage of something. A perfect example is total Facebook Likes. Having 15,000 likes on a Facebook page has little value if it was at 15,000 likes 12 months ago. If we turn that into a percentage of growth over the last 12 months the percentage would be zero. See how the percentage tells you more than the total number? Now if someone had only 1000 likes, but it rose from 500 likes over the last 12-months, that’s a 100% growth!! Now we’re talking. Stay with me, let’s take this whole percentage thing further. If you have 1000 likes and 700 of those people saw your post, that’s a a 70% reach. You reached 7 out of 10 of your customers. If those 250 people liked, shared, or commented on your post, that’s a 25% engagement. In other words 1 out of 4 people were engaged enough with your content to take action.
REACH=How many people saw your message
ENGAGEMENT= How many people reacted to your message
Reach and engagement are by far more important ways to measure the success of your social media campaign. This is not limited to Facebook, there are similar ways to gauge reach and engagement with other social media like LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter.
EXAMPLES of REACH METRICS for other social media
- LinkedIn Connections
- Twitter Following
- Facebook Business Likes
- YouTube Subscribers
- Implementation of Google Analytics
You can measure your reach by keeping track of these statistics yourself. Social networking sites, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, all have their own analytic reports you can track.
EXAMPLES OF ENGAGEMENT METRICS for other social media
- Clicks on your social media posts
- Retweets, Mentions, and Direct Messages on Twitter
- Shares and Likes on Facebook and LinkedIn
- Comments to your Facebook and LinkedIn posts
- Ratings and Comments on YouTube videos
- Comments to your blog posts
The take away message is remember that raw numbers and totals don’t have much value in marketing assessment, you don’t only want bigger numbers; you also want better numbers. At Brainjar Media we keep our eye on the prize and make sure we increase the numbers that matter to your business. Want to find out what your numbers are? Call us today at 503.492-6500