Social Media Should Be about Engagement Not Likes and Followers

Marketing is all about engaging with the customers and measuring your results. There is never a cookie cutter approach to anything and that is what makes it difficult and fun. We all use social media on a regular basis but for business purposes the approach is a bit different. 

The typical business owner cares about two things, likes and followers. They think if they have a large enough number for these two their social media profiles are a success and no longer need any further development.  They could not be more wrong with their reasoning. Yes, these two figures are the popular ones but there are more effective figures that will help you measure success.

 Before embarking on a social campaign you have to lay out your set of goals. You have to establish what the goals are and why you want to achieve them. For example, a goal could be to increase the number of comments per post; in turn this will increase customer engagement.

To those not in the loop, likes and follower figures can be manipulated. There are plenty of places where you can pay someone to increase your likes and followers. Granted these are not targeted or real users but they will look nice on your fan page.

Your most important stats should revolve around engagement. Specifically with Facebook, the Edgerank algorithm determines the weight of your posts, giving comments much more weight than likes. If you want your posts to be shared and show up on other peoples newsfeeds you need people to engage with them.

When people engage they are simultaneously contributing to a discussion and are creating genuine content on your behalf. This is why social media is a very cost efficient form of marketing, it could lead to infinite possibilities and cost you almost nothing.

In terms of ROI you can’t find a better marketing outlet than Social Media. If done correctly you can increase your brand equity while driving traffic to your website. Having a social profile is nothing, being active and consistent with posting quality content is a different story.

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Top 5 Reasons Social Media Sentiment Should be Your Focus

There’s been a long standing debate on what social media metrics matter the most and how we should be tracking them.

Since the inception of Facebook Fan Pages and company Twitter accounts, success was initially defined by the number of followers or fans a company had on their accounts. So many of us who manage social media accounts, started tracking and strategizing around this metric.  But focusing just on volume seemed somewhat flawed. Of course large brands will have a large following; these brands are recognizable and reliable so it’s difficult to say the number of followers directly indicates the success of their social media presence. 

Since strictly measuring the number of followers may not be as important as originally thought, the measurement quickly grew to include the number of actively engaged followers on a page. These being the followers posting on your page, commenting on your posts, and participating in any activity the company utilizes on the page. This is certainly a better way to measure social media presence but there’s still some inconsistencies surrounding this. While engagement is essential to a thriving community, it doesn’t tell the whole story of what is happening on or around your company’s social media presence. 

Here is where social media sentiment comes in, sentiment is important and should be a main focus when evaluating your company’s social media presence and strategy. These 5 reasons can give you insight on why sentiment is so powerful and why you should be tracking it.

1. Sentiment Can Help You to Understand Your Audience

Using sentiment to understand your audience can be incredibly eye opening. Are you actually targeting and engaging with the correct demographic? Who are the people mentioning you positively and which ones are mentioning you negatively? By tracking the sentiment on mentions of your brand, you may find opportunities in areas you hadn’t considered before. 

2. Learn from Past Successes

Did you recently launch a social media campaign with great success? Find out why people liked this particular campaign by reviewing what they said about it over social media. This sentiment can help to identify what characteristics of a campaign are a home-run with your audience.

3. Learn from Past Failures

Using sentiment analysis to learn from past failures is a must. People reach out to social media when they have a problem or grip. This information should be harnessed to understand the reasons your customer base did not enjoy a product release, campaign, or design change and then used to your benefit in the future.

4. Compare Yourself to Others in the Market 

If you have taken the step to start tracking your own sentiment, don’t stop there. While tracking sentiment about one topic or brand is great it’s beneficial to track competitors and competing products to see how yours fare in the marketplace. Account management and engagement products, Viralheat for one, can help you do that and they make it easy to compare sentiment and view sentiment trends on one or many topics.

5. Work to Improve your Sentiment

It’s difficult to know you have a problem without tracking it first. Once you have started to track your online sentiment you can view how you’re trending and decide if you need to work to improve your sentiment.

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