Valorie Reavis, social media marketing specialist and founder of LinkUp Marketing
Valorie Reavis, social media marketing specialist and founder of LinkUp Marketing

An old marketing trick when writing something for an advertisement or a direct marketing campaign was to ask yourself, “Who cares?” This old trick has become the new trick of social media as it’s even more important to ask yourself this when you have to post something witty, insightful and inspiring every day on all the networks you have followers on. But before you go off to share this tip on your Facebook page, let’s first focus on how you can measure who cares about what you are saying on Facebook.

To date we’ve talked about who likes your page, how they found you on Facebook and also who is engaging with you on the social network. The softer side of engagement, the precursor if you will, is called reach, or the number of people that have directly or indirectly come into contact with your message. This is an indication of a healthy campaign as it shows who is able to read your messages and because you can’t ‘like’ what you can’t see, right?

Contrary to popular belief, just because someone ‘likes’ your page doesn’t mean they see every update. In fact, it couldn’t be farther from the truth, especially for pages with low levels of engagement. If you have a lot of people that like your page, but you don’t have many people interacting with you, Facebook assumes you are boring and will push you down the priority list when choosing what to show in your fans’ newsfeed. For example, if Susan likes your page but hasn’t been back to the page or doesn’t like or comment on your updates very frequently, but is an active member of her yoga studio Facebook page, Facebook will prioritize updates from her yoga studio over your updates. When the average person has 150 friends and likes 40 brand pages on average, you better believe that means you should be shooting for engagement over likes every day of the week.

So, how do you see how many people you are reaching? There are a few places to be aware of. The first is in the Insights area on the main tab, where it says “Friends of Fans”. This is the total number of people who have liked your page along with the number of people connected to them. This demonstrates the potential reach if every single person who has liked your page created a story about your update.

The second area to pay attention to is under the ‘Reach’ tab in your insights.  This has a breakdown of the demographics of the people who are paying attention to your updates.  Is this different to the people that have ‘liked’ your page?  Is it different tothose who are engaging with you?

If this is different to your engaged users, perhaps you should consider altering your messages.For example, if most of your likes are women between 35 and 44, but most of the people that are reading your messages (reach) are mostly women between 18 and 24, you may want to look at your messaging.  Do a lot of your posts relate more to the older generation or younger?  Who are you trying to attract?

You can also monitor ‘reach by post’ on the wall underneath each individual post, which is useful as you can seehow many people have seen each actual post.

This part of managing a Facebook page is all about reflection and revision.  Grab that Yogi tea and go through your Facebook Insights to see if what you are posting is being accepted by your audience and if it’s having the desired effect.

Valorie Reavis is part of Linkup Marketing, an online and social media marketing specialist focusing on search engine marketingsalon email marketing programs and social media marketing for salons and spas. If you have any queries for the Linkup team check out the website www.linkupmarketing.com, email info@linkupmarketing.com, find them on facebook.com/linkupmarketing or follow them on Twitter @linkupmarketing.

 

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