Comments, Likes, Shares – A means or an end?

For a business looking to ace its web engagement and deepen its digital footprint, how many likes is enough likes? How many shares does it take to go viral, and what effect does that have on your business? Digital is so different from traditional media because it is easy to quantify and measure every ounce of effort. You can immediately notice that $5 spent on Facebook ads gained 200 likes for your business. But not all metrics are created equal. Here’s why:  

Understanding the Metrics

When it comes to metrics on social media platforms, how individual metrics are collated is as important as the metrics themselves. For example, both Twitter and Facebook have Impressions but only the latter measures Reach. Also, while Facebook counts views after only 3 seconds, YouTube starts counting after 30 seconds. These insights are important if you have to decide between the success rates of your own digital marketing efforts or let Gesatech take care of it for you. Facebook Insights is a trove of treasures. The Overview tab, for example, will show you how the last few posts performed among your audience. You can even see key information about your competitor’s page and how you are faring against them. The People Tab breaks down the demographic representation of the people who follow your page. They can be grouped by gender and age as well as by geographic location. Twitter Insights are not as detailed, but they still give you relevant data on how many people visited your profile, how many times you were mentioned, and the number of tweets that are linking back to you. Twitter gives you this information over a 28-day period. In addition to the audience breakdown, you also get to see your engagement rate for each tweet or retweet. Being a professional site, LinkedIn makes it easy to compare your numbers with other companies. You can also filter through your demographics to highlight users based on their seniority at their places of work, their functions, as well as the industries within which they operate. You can even know the size of the company they work in to determine if more of your followers are coming from large firms or smaller ones.

Reach vs Impressions

Numbers don’t lie. A social page with a huge following has more potential than one with a small following. The danger with this is making decisions based solely on the size of your following. If you have 2000 followers on Twitter but only received 25 retweets on your post, then focusing on the number of followers to impress your clients is not good marketing. On the other hand, metrics like Impressions and Reach are far more important because of the information they convey. Impressions measure how many times your content is shared to social media users, even if they don’t interact with it. If a user sees your original post and then sees it again when someone shares it, it counts as two impressions. Reach, on the other hand, measures your social page’s spread at any given time. Reach is the number of unique persons who see your content over a period of time.

Conversions

Conversion rate is the percentage of people who respond positively to a call-to-action (CTA) on your social page or website. When you run a discount promotion, the conversion rate is the number of people who redeem the coupon at checkout. Customers simply sharing the post will increase its reach and earn you more fans, but it is the number of successful sales that will measure your success. As investments go, conversion rates are the simplest form of measuring ROI. Combining CTAs with enough quality content will give your business a better chance at success. And if you want to know what quality content can do, take a look at our exciting offers on blog posts, social media account management and web engagement strategy.

Goals

Social media will always give you one result or the other. You will have likes, fans will share your posts and, eventually, some will leave comments. All these forms of engagement, however, do not mean the same thing. The only way to appreciate what is happening is to know what you hope to achieve in the first place. If you are looking to gather leads via a social post, then two thousand likes might not necessarily mean much. After all, your intention is to get people to indicate interest by leaving their personal details. And so people sharing and liking your post might not lead to your goal’s end. Likes and other metrics only matter if you have a yardstick against which you measure success. That yardstick must by all means be the goal you intend to achieve. Straying from your purpose will leave you doing much with little progress. It is therefore important to have a social media/digital marketing strategy that feeds into your entire business objectives.

Count Your Steps

Measure these metrics regularly and compare them to previous stats to register growth or stagnation. Facebook’s Audience Growth Rate, for example, is important because it shows how much your audience is growing over time. This gives you the basics upon which to formulate and implement your digital marketing strategy. With a goal in hand and a clear understanding that not all likes are likable, you will find digital marketing success. Likes and shares are cool engagement metrics. They tell you how much your content is buzzing. To take your web engagement to the next level, though, it is necessary to understand what the values mean for the goal you want to achieve. Find out how we can help you strategize to reach your ultimate goals. For a business looking to ace its web engagement and deepen its digital footprint, how many likes is enough likes? How many shares does it take to go viral, and what effect does that have on your business? Digital is so different from traditional media because it is easy to quantify and measure every ounce of effort. You can immediately notice that $5 spent on Facebook ads gained 200 likes for your business. But not all metrics are created equal. Here’s why:

Understanding the Metrics

When it comes to metrics on social media platforms, how individual metrics are collated is as important as the metrics themselves. For example, both Twitter and Facebook have Impressions but only the latter measures Reach. Also, while Facebook counts views after only 3 seconds, YouTube starts counting after 30 seconds. These insights are important if you have to decide between the success rates of your digital marketing campaign or let Gesatech take care of it for you. Facebook Insights is a trove of treasures. The Overview tab, for example, will show you how the last few posts performed among your audience. You can even see key information about your competitor’s page and how you are faring against them. The People Tab breaks down the demographic representation of the people who follow your page. They can be grouped by gender and age as well as by geographic location. Twitter Insights are not as detailed, but they still give you relevant data on how many people visited your profile, how many times you were mentioned, and the number of tweets that are linking back to you. Twitter gives you this information over a 28-day period. In addition to the audience breakdown, you also get to see your engagement rate for each tweet or retweet. Being a professional site, LinkedIn makes it easy to compare your numbers with other companies. You can also filter through your demographics to highlight users based on their seniority at their places of work, their functions, as well as the industries within which they operate. You can even know the size of the company they work in to determine if more of your followers are coming from large firms or smaller ones.

Reach vs Impressions

Numbers don’t lie. A social page with a huge following has more potential than one with a small following. The danger with this is making decisions based solely on the size of your following. If you have 2000 followers on Twitter but only received 25 retweets on your post, then focusing on the number of followers to impress your clients is not good marketing. On the other hand, metrics like Impressions and Reach are far more important because of the information they convey. Impressions measure how many times your content is shared to social media users, even if they have seen it before. If a user sees your original post and then sees it again when someone shares it, it counts as two impressions. Reach, on the other hand, measures your social page’s spread at any given time. Reach is the number of unique persons who see your content over a period of time.

Conversions

Conversion rate is the percentage of people who respond positively to a call-to-action (CTA) on your social page or website. When you run a discount promotion, the conversion rate is the number of people who redeem the coupon at checkout. Customers simply sharing the post will increase its reach and earn you more fans, but it is the number of successful sales that will measure your success. As investments go, conversion rates are the simplest form of measuring ROI. Combining CTAs with enough quality content will give your business a better chance at success. And if you want to know what quality content can do, take a look at our exciting offers on blog posts, social media account management and web engagement strategy.

Goals

Social media will always give you one result or the other. You will have likes, fans will share your posts and, eventually, some will leave comments. All these forms of engagement, however, do not mean the same thing. The only way to appreciate what is happening is to know what you hope to achieve in the first place. If you are looking to gather leads via a social post, then two thousand likes might not necessarily mean much. After all, your intention is to get people to indicate interest by leaving their personal details. And so people sharing and liking your post might not lead to your goal’s end. Likes and other metrics only matter if you have a yardstick against which you measure success. That yardstick must by all means be the goal you intend to achieve. Straying from your purpose will leave you doing much with little progress. It is therefore important to have a social media/digital marketing strategy that feeds into your entire business objective.

Count Your Steps

Measure these metrics regularly and compare them to previous stats to register growth or stagnation. Facebook’s Audience Growth Rate, for example, is important because it shows how much your audience is growing over time. This gives you the basics upon which to formulate and implement your digital marketing strategy. With a goal in hand and a clear understanding that not all likes are likable, you will find digital marketing success. Likes and shares are cool engagement metrics. They tell you how much your content is buzzing. To take your web engagement to the next level, though, it is necessary to understand what the values mean for the goal you want to achieve. Find out how we can help you strategize to reach your ultimate goals.