Social media engagement is one of the most important measurements of the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts.
The term “engagement” refers to the fact that someone has taken some kind of action on what you put on social media, such as like, comment, or share. Your mindset when you post on social media, especially as small businesses, should be to engage your followers. Your goal is to get people to do something with your content.
Understanding Engagement on Facebook
- Engagement hasn’t always been the goal of posting on Facebook. The most important indicators of a successful Facebook page used to be the number of page likes that you had and how many times a day you were posting. Today, however, it’s how much engagement you’re getting on your posts. You actually shouldn't post several times a day, or, even worse, use automated posting services that generate generic content that gets little to no engagement.
- Facebook wants to be the favorite social media platform. If your Facebook timeline were full of meaningless, useless content that you didn’t care about, chances are you would eventually stop spending time on Facebook. Facebook has recently determined that the things people want to see are the things people are having meaningful conversations about. In other words, if you're posting content that's not getting people to have a conversation in the comments, then those posts are not going to be useful to your page. Those posts could actually hurt your results in Facebook because they’re teaching the Facebook algorithm that people are indifferent to what you’re posting. As a result, Facebook is going to show your content to fewer people.
- Facebook wants to try to help you be successful with your business. The more successful you are through Facebook, the more you’ll pay Facebook for continued success. If you're not successful with marketing on Facebook, you’re going to move on to something else. So do the things that Facebook encourages you to do. For the most part, you're going to be successful… at least more successful than if you try to take shortcuts that end up hurting you!
If It Sounds Too Good To Be True…
There are advanced marketers out there who have found ways trick the system to get more bang for the buck, so to speak. But when those workarounds are exposed, Facebook shuts them down fairly quickly because they don't want their system or their members to be abused. By the time the average business hears about a shortcut or a technique that will “trick” the system, Facebook has already figured it out and has found ways to thwart it. Trying to implement these techniques can hurt you or even get your account banned. So if you hear about a technique that gets you amazing results with little effort, it’s probably too good to be true.
If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.
Milton Berle