Round 1
If your business has a social media presence (if it doesn’t then it needs one like, now) then you are likely to be familiar with the terms like, share, retweet, comment, engagement, like, view, follow. But do you understand what those terms mean when relating to your social media campaigns? These metrics are used to determine how a campaign is performing and they can also be used to strategise future campaigns.
Sometimes trying to decide which information is more valuable can be confusing but we have some tips to help you decide if social reach or engagement are more beneficial to your next campaign. So, what is the difference between social reach and engagement?
In the blue corner is social reach.
Social reach tells you how many users have seen your content. The potential reach will be the number of followers you have on social media but remember not all the followers will see each of the content that is posted.
FYI- there is a difference between social reach and impressions, the impressions are the number of TIMES the content has been looked at whereas the social reach is the number of USERS that have viewed it.
And, in the red corner, we have engagement.
Engagement is how users interact with your content. Have your audience stopped scrolling and interacted with your post?
The engagement rate (pretty much does what it says on the tin) determines the rate that the content has been interacted with.
Engagement can be measured by the amount of action that is instigated by the content. This is where shares, likes, retweets views and comments get counted, as those are forms of engagement.
Ding, ding. Round 2
So, now we have differentiated between the two we can look at which might be more important to your campaign and do that we need to know the key objectives.
Campaigns that are focusing on brand awareness will want to be seen by the largest amount of targeted users as possible. This means that social reach is important and using methods that promote this are the best course of action here.
For a business that is looking to directly increase traffic to their website thus boosting sales, a campaign that promotes high engagement, by instigating conversations and shares, might be more beneficial.
Of course, if you are a lover, not a fighter you can have your finger in every pie. There is no problem with mixing things up and aiming for different performance with each campaign. Whatever you decide, make sure you know the objectives of the campaign before you start it and review the outcome of the campaign once it has run to deliver content that performs well each time. Don’t just post and hope!
Get in touch with Purely Personal Marketing for more information on how our expertise and creativeness can help your business reach more customers.
For information on Social Media Marketing, just drop us an email at