Does Size Matter (in Social Media)?
The summer is almost over, everyone is returning from their vacations and the kids are heading back to school. It's back to the grind! This week we're featuring another blog post from the past that we hope you'll enjoy. Have a great week!
Admit it, one of the first things you do when you look at someone’s social media profile is to see how many followers or likes they have. Wanting or needing to be liked is not an unusual trait. But how does that work with social media?
For a business, your number of likes or community size is often referred to as a vanity metric, because while it may cause you to beam with pride, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the demographics of your community are relevant to your product or service or that your community is engaged with the content you are generating on social. Yet it’s the most prominent and easy to understand metric on a social media page. As an agency, we have had more than one client express dismay that Competitor X had more likes than their own business.
What really should matter is whether or not your community finds your content engaging (or worthy of commenting, sharing or clicking) and if it is driving brand loyalty. This is ultimately what drives sales, which is the main point of your social media efforts in the first place. So focusing on engagement is a priority for us. Every month we take a look at how each post did; which were successful, which were not. The most engaging posts steer our content in the subsequent months.
Most, but not all of our clients are able to measure traffic to their websites from their social media sites. (BTW we strongly encourage this!) For a number of them, this is an extremely important metric because this is where we can find the elusive social media ROI. Even if the website analytics can’t capture conversion, it is still a telling story that the strategy is working.
Let's Talk Community Engagement
A friend of mine is a semi-professional photographer. He doesn’t make a full-time living from his pictures, but there is no doubt his outdoor images on Instagram are breathtaking and unique. So much so that he has become an Instagram Influencer, which essentially means that a variety of companies provide him with their products just to be included and tagged in his Instagram posts. But even this has its limitations as this article by Digiday explains. There is a point of diminishing returns for engagement with regard to community size and thus the new focus is on ‘micro-influencers’ or those with between 1,000 – 100,000 followers. Once again engagement is paramount.
Should you find yourself at a loss of how to grab your audience and grow your community or if you simply do not have the time, you can always give us call. We would love to make you shine and be ‘liked’ and to help you grow your community organically. In the meantime, we invite you to be a part of our community on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @ThinPigMedia.