Investigating Effective Engagement in Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is both a mystery and painfully obvious to most of us. On one hand, if you've used Facebook and Twitter you know how easy it can be to feel engaged - especially when dealing with friends. On the other, you probably haven't got a clue how to translate the experiences of using social networks as an end-user to Using Social Networks As An Effective Marketer (TM).

We'd like to work through a few of the ways you can begin to map out your success with social media, including:

Selecting the correct metrics
Getting to know your audience (testing)
Gaining a social presence or a community "culture"
How to know if it is "working"

There are a few metrics to be used for measuring social engagement on Facebook:

Virality
"Reach" of individual posts
Shares
"Likes" on individual posts

Ideally, of course, all these numbers would be as high as possible, so rather than thinking about which metric is "best" for you, you're really talking about which metric is best for you first. The others may ideally be considered second and third-stage engagement measures.

For our Facebook page, we considered the first metric of use to be the "reach" of individual posts. We considered what our main goal of the page was - and for us, it was to expand membership and get more visitors to join the community.

While shares might have been a better indicator of "spreading" a message, we'd never had one! Our logic followed that the best way to get to a point where "shares" could be a useful metric was to increase the number of people reached - after all, the more people we reach, the more likely someone willing to share will see the content.

We decided that the first job then was to improve our "reach". We looked back at our data to see the ways in which we were sharing the content. Nearly all were in the "link" format as we originally published from a feed to our Facebook page. Our reach hung around the 70 mark on all these "link" posts.

We found that there were a few posts with a higher reach, hanging around the 100 mark. On investigating these we found them to be the ones we'd entered into the Facebook page ourselves. A jump from a reach of 70 to 100 isn't to be sniffed at, so we looked at why these might be more popular.

Two theories:

We're curating: the content in these cases and consciously picking items we knew our members would like. Naturally, these would gather a further reach as the post aligns better with their interests.
Links get ignored: Links on Facebook may be a bit of a blind spot for some. Often Facebook users don't want to be taken away from the site, and as such, they may be ignoring links out of habit. If users do not click "link" posts all that often it may be that, in turn, they don't get shown links all that often. There may be a built-in bias against links from brand pages.

This led us to believe that we would improve our "reach" by adding stories as text posts. So we did.

The improvement was drastic. Our average "reach" for a test post (which still contained a link - just not as a "link" post) increased to 100 on the day of posting, increasing to around 120-130 the day afterwards.

Victory, right?

Not just yet. We'd improved our "reach" and garnered a few new followers, but what about the other types of content we posted, for example, pictures?

Knowing our users (having previously tested email newsletters on them) we know that they like pictures of cute animals (after all, who doesn't?). We began regularly posting pictures of cute animals, mostly at lunchtime. We found a few things:

They like pictures; our "reach" improves to around the 150 to 180 mark by posting a picture.
They're more likely to comment on the pictures.
Pictures are more likely to be shared.
They prefer cats to dogs.

From this experience we learned that:

The less someone has to engage, the more likely they will
They really like cats
Pictures work!

What Now?

After getting that all-important share we decided to keep it up. There is a small, but a positive uptick in page "Likes" and our content is regularly shared by our fans.

The real answer is "more testing". We need to pick our next metric to improve and attempt to do so. For us, this might mean seeing if we can increase "shares" and "virality" by adding more social hooks (such as questions or little-known facts presented visually) or even direct requests to share a piece of content.

Ultimately we found out what works best for our members and that through evaluating the way your members interact (or don't) with your social content, you can find easy ways to improve your social engagement.