Michael Cohn
For your business, if you are not experienced with Facebook, if you don’t know the ins and outs of the social media tool, you may feel that getting people to “like” your business’s Facebook page is enough. On the other hand, if you have more experience with Facebook, you probably understand that engagement rate is a whole other thing entirely.
Proceed carefully
Interestingly, and often not well-known, Facebook has a great deal of tools that can help the business owner to analyze the results of their business’s social media efforts. One of the things that you will want to take advantage of on Facebook is People Talking About Us, which can help you to gauge the engagement rate of your fans. It is essential that you capture that information and it should be a major part of your social media marketing campaign. When it comes to likes and engagement rate, you should proceed carefully and wrap your mind around the information so that you understand not only what the metrics mean but also how those statistics contribute to your professional success. If you focus on your engagement rate, that means that you are focusing on the interactions that you are sharing with your readers. That is one level up from merely “liking” what you are offering. In other words, you are starting to build meaningful, long-lasting relationships with those people and, as everyone is well aware, the heart of successful social media interactions is the relationship itself. If people are interacting with you, they are not only connecting with you but they are also connecting with your brand and with your offerings. Once you have established a solid foundation in your relationship with your online connections, the other person’s willingness (and excitement) to buy what you are offering is just around the corner. The higher your engagement rate, the more likely you will be to sell more.
Wrap your arms around your competition
According to research results, a relatively small number of people on Facebook engage with brands. They are far more willing to engage with people directly. With that in mind, it is pretty easy to understand exactly how your direct competition is doing on Facebook. If your competitors are doing well on Facebook, you will probably be able to figure out what they are doing and do the same thing with equally positive results. Conversely, if your competitors are not doing well, you can identify that too and steer clear of those particular practices. It is probably well-known that all business should be paying much more attention to engagement rate than likes. However, if they are paying a great deal of attention to likes, they may wish to rethink that. Engagement equals interaction. Interaction equals relationship building. When you build a relationship, you take a large number of factors into consideration. It is important to remember that not everyone is a part of your ideal target audience. First and foremost, you must identify your target audience. Next, you need to engage the members of your target audience. Once you have been able to accomplish that, you can build trust and credibility between you, which will hopefully stand the test of time.
Conclusion
The conclusion that you can draw here is that engagement is the next step beyond “likes” and you can safely assume that if the person engages with you, they also “like” you and your business. Of course, the opposite cannot necessarily be assumed. A part of your engagement with your online connections is being able to solve the other person’s problem(s). Their satisfaction is the key to your professional success. It is critical that you understand that you should never rely only on a single metric. Whether all of your metrics are of equal importance or not, it is important to pay attention to all of them and to make that a strong part of your engagement strategy. There are many different facets in your engagement rate, such as page size, industry, reach, and brand. It is critical that you give each one the time and attention that it deserves.
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