Week 6 Assignment

All right, this week's assignment is getting to the meaty center of what I really want to get some help with! Social media isn't anything special unless there is interaction between people. Even if the "people" are an anonymous customer and a faceless corporate entity. Behind the on-screen comments, people are typing the text. If a post isn't liked did it actually get posted? Lets delve into this particular mystery of making the most of Social Media.

Define the difference between post reach and post engagement. This question gets to the heart of what I believe most business fail to realize about using social media. The definitions in this blog post are how I interpret the difference between these two words. Reach, as I see it, is just the number of Facebook accounts that your business' post appeared in. Through the tools available to a content creator, post reach seems to be the thing people focus on the most. Most of the social media platforms push reach as the primary metric as well. Post engagement is an entirely different matter and I truly believe the most important term to hone in on. Post engagement is the count of how many of the users that saw your post actually commented on what you created. Post engagement can, depending on the platform, be carved into even more granular pieces such as number of clicks, comments and likes.

Why is knowing the difference important? The most important reason we should be know the difference between these terms is the shear costs involved. Facebook is really good about trying to get a content creator to buy the opportunity to get more reach. One could very easily budget advertising geared solely towards increasing reach and in the end not get any more income from those funding efforts. On the other hand, if a business digs into the available engagement data to carefully craft their posts and make the most of each one, then the dollars spent will better translate into sales. There is a balance needed between reach and engagement You need enough reach so that you can gather data from what happens when you post, but you need engagement to make your posts worthwhile. It may be a wise strategy to initially concentrate on reach and then transition to engagement as long as you know what data can be gathered from each specific platform to use it efficiently.

After defining the terms, describe how a business can use Facebook Insights to better serve their customers. Engagement can really help a company get to know their customers.  If all of your customers are engaging through comments and shares, but the things they are saying are negative, a company should pay attention. Obviously the opposite is true as well and a company can get valuable information on what they are doing correctly. I use the limited amount of data available to me from the blogger platform to try and understand what type of posts have the most traction. Since I use my blog's Facebook page to drive  people to my blog, I have a secondary set of data to tell me how well my posts are working. I can craft them work specifically for the Facebook segment of my target market. I could also bootstrap my strategy by starting with buying a little extra reach, use the data to better craft posts and then when I have the formula dialed in, buy more reach and repeat the process. 

In closing, the analytic tools that are available for each platform need to be understood to be helpful. Reach is good, but engagement is better. Social media is just that, social so just getting your post out into the Internet isn't going to get people to know your business. If anyone has any differing opinions on the matter, I'd love to engage with you in discussion. Do you see what I did there? Thanks for looking!