Engagement on social media is best compared to being committed to another person in real life. It is a relationship that is built through time. It has to be nurtured and is typically a longtime commitment. The same goes with your customers. You have to communicate with them as they communicate with you. It’s very similar to customer service in many ways, but it can also be very different. Engagement is being SOCIAL with your customers and ensuring that every piece of content you put out is conversational or “engaging.”  Engagement is also defined by likes, comments, shares, retweets, mentions, etc., which means that whenever someone takes action on your post or page, they are engaging. On many different platforms like Facebook and Twitter, engagement is measured by reach and impressions.

Reach: The number of people who see your content

All of your followers should see your content. However, your actual reach is defined by the effective audience. The effective audience is people who see your posts through shares, when other people like your post, or through advertising. To put simply, reach is the number of people who see your content.

When incorporating social ads, your reach tends to go up because you are targeting people outside of your followers to like, follow, or engage with your page. Social ads can be beneficial for different companies in that it boosts engagement overall.

Impressions: The number of times your content is displayed

According to Sprout Social, an impression is the number of times your content is displayed. The person who views your post doesn’t necessarily have to engage with it for it to count as an impression. Unfortunately, numbers can be skewed because one person can have multiple impressions for one piece of content. For example if your friend shares a post that you’ve already seen that counts as two impressions since you’ve seen it twice.

Reminder: Reach is the number of people who may have seen your content, while impressions are the total number of times the people you’ve reached may have seen your content.

Why is this valuable?

“There is no ROI in anything if you don’t learn how to use it.” -Gary Vaynerchuk

If your content isn’t getting any engagement, then there’s something wrong with either your content or the audience that you’re targeting. You should always be striving to get your customers to join in on your conversation. Always do your best to attract and delight! Attract those that are new to your product and delight those who already use it. Impressions and reach are two factors that drive people to take action.

Social media engagement gives your business the ability to directly engage with customers, build your brand’s presence, and sell products in a free space where thousands of people can see it. As people engage with you, you’ll have a place to test out new products, ask questions, and get customer feedback.

To get the true return on investment from your social media, you have to put forth the effort to have good content, engaging posts, and someone to monitor it all. Learn how to effectively use your social media and when you understand how everything works, you’ll be able to help boost your social media profiles to a new level!