How important is fan growth to you and your organisation. Is it still the top priority, the right priority and the key metric you report back on?
If you want your followers or like count to increase you can if you wish pretty much buy them. But you’re likely buying bulk likes from people who don’t even have any interest in your brand or product. So why bother?
At e-nexus we believe that fan growth doesn’t matter if your audience isn’t engaging with your content. You can have as many followers as you like but if what you post gets no engagement, your followers have very little value for you, your organisation or your brand.
Focus on engagement rather than the number of followers
Whatever your social media objective, engagement is a far more important and useful metric. For example the level of engagement influences the probability of and the numbers of your audience who will see (referred to as reach) your content in their news feeds.
One important example of engagement is shares. Shares influence how many people see your posts. Recent changes to Facebook News Feeds prioritise content that comes from family and friends over content posted by fan pages. Therefore it is essential to create content that your audiences will want to share with their own networks.
Another critical but currently often neglected component is reactions. Facebook has updated its news feed algorithm again, this time with an emphasis on your audiences use of ‘reactions’. The social network now prioritises reactions over “likes” when ranking your News Feed. According to the company, a reaction is a stronger indicator that you want to see similar posts to ones you like.
Monitor others
Don’t forget to monitor the social media engagement that your competitors are gaining as this can provide a useful benchmark over your social posts performance. Don’t just look at the posts but aim to delve deeper by splitting the monitoring of both organic and paid posts. If your competitors out perform you on their organic posts then it would suggest that their content resonates well with their audiences thus boosting their reach for ‘free’.
For more ideas on how to transform your marketing visit our e-nexus blog at www.measure4success.wordpress.com or visit our website at www.e-nexus.co.uk
