Measure engagements if you want to improve your Facebook campaign’s success.
Facebook has historically attempted to throttle the organic visibility you can achieve without paying for advertising, but because it’s both free and universally available, Facebook remains a powerful and popular marketing platform for small businesses. Any small business owner can create a business page and promote it, building an audience organically and hopefully, generating revenue from those followers.
Conventionally, you can measure your success in this endeavor in terms of “engagements,” or meaningful interactions with Facebook users.
These are some of the engagements that matter most.
- Page likes. This is the most straightforward and most commonly measured type of engagement. When a Facebook user finds your page, they can “like” it to follow it and receive updates for your brand. Your number of followers represents your current level of visibility, and generally speaking, the higher it is, the better. To get a like, you need someone to discover your page and give them a good first impression.
- Post reactions. Facebook now offers a multitude of reaction types, including standard “likes,” love icons, angry icons, “haha” icons, and sad icons. Any reaction you evoke can be good, so long as you’re evoking it strategically. Posts with more reactions also tend to be more visible, meaning you should try to get as many reactions as possible.
- Shares. For someone to share your work, they have to be impressed or moved by it. In other words, you need to post quality content. Again, shared work is much more visible, so there’s a massive benefit to earning more shares.
- Comments. Users can also comment on your posts, sometimes starting lengthy discussion threads. Comments are great for encouraging user-to-user interactions, and can be a tool to make your posts even more visible.
Getting the engagements is another challenge. There are many competing theories for which strategies are most effective, and different businesses will require different tactics. If you need help putting a social media strategy together, contact us for a free consultation today!