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If you’ve been around social media for a while you’ve probably come across the terms reach, engagement and likes but often people don’t know exactly what they mean and why they matter.
With that in mind, I thought I could break them down for you:
Likes:
This one is the easiest one to understand, as you’ve probably guessed. This metric is used to see what your followers think about your post, so the more likes you get, the better!
When using Facebook you can also react to a post in other ways, such as with a laugh, love, surprise,sadness or anger emojis. Despite the anger and the sadness ones being more negative, these reactions are all part of the ‘engagement metric’ and are very useful to measure what people think about the content you’re creating.
This tactic of using reactions has also been adopted by LinkedIn recently, which now allows you to choose from ‘celebrate’, ‘like’, ‘curious’, ‘love’ or ‘insightful’ buttons. These options from both Facebook and LinkedIn were created when some users expressed the desire to state a clearer opinion about certain posts and the ‘like’ button just wasn’t enough.
That being said, whether you are looking to increase your page’s overall likes or the number of likes on an individual post, you should definitely focus on creating the type of content that your followers are interested in.
Reach:
When you create a post online, you probably want to know how many people it has reached to know whether it did well or whether you should rethink your content strategy.
That reach is even more useful when you are advertising online because it will give you the perception of whether or not you’ve targeted the ad correctly. If you are not reaching the number of people you want to, you should first look at the content and see if it is something that your potential users or buyers would be interested in. If you are confident that it is, then you should look at your target audience and adjust the content so you can increase your reach.
Reach is also a great way to measure the success of your campaign or post. For example, if you have reached 1,000 people and you only got one like, maybe the post was not that successful and you should adjust it to get better results.
Here are some tips that can help you boost your reach:
- Use video: the algorithms of most social networks prioritize video content, so you should be able to reach more people with video than with a photo.
- Beware of including too much text: social networks don’t like posts with a lot of text covering the post, so if you have a lot to say write that in the post description and leave the visual asset as clean as possible.
- Be family friendly: sometimes you want to be edgy with your content and there is nothing wrong with that, but just bear in mind that slang or swear words are usually taken into consideration by social network algorithms and can decrease your reach. However, if you feel that it fits your brand, then go ahead!
Engagement:
The engagement rate of your brand or posts is the relation between the number of likes/reactions they garner and your reach. With more brands online everyday and new social networks being created every month, you should not just look at how many likes a page has but also the level of engagement it has with its followers.
It really doesn’t matter if you have 10,000 likes on your page if you get an average of 500 likes per post, because that means that a lot of your followers just aren’t connecting with your content. In fact, sometimes it is better to have just 2,000 likes on your page but have those 500 likes per post since it means that many of your followers like what you are posting. Still, you should of course try to increase your number of followers, but you should do this the right way. Rather than using crazy tactics to increase the number overnight, you should try to build it up gradually while keeping the same engagement rate — which means that as your followers multiply, so do the number of likes on your posts.
Lastly, it is important to add that nowadays experts are looking more and more at engagement rates when it comes to brands and advertising. For example, most influencers have to share their engagement rates rather than just the number of followers or likes they have on their profile. Why? Because engagement is the only metric that can go some way towards measuring your relationship with your followers and that is what matters.
Do you have any questions about these or other social media metrics? Let me know how I can help!
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