Social Media Reach
Every social media manager has had that moment. You spend countless hours planning a meticulous online campaign for a client. You go back to the drawing board several times to get that perfect amount of chutzpah in your campaign. After numerous revisions, and multiple sessions with your designers, you begin your campaign and start posting on your social streams. And then the wait begins. The wait for them likes. For the retweets and the favorites. But they never come. All that hard work and several hours later, all you have is a little activity on your social media streams and an even fewer numbers of interactions.
You wanted it to go viral – the kind that takes your clients from the depth of internet abyss to being the poster boys of social media. But instead, you got the kind of viral that makes your client sick when they see the month end report–because you didn’t fully understand the importance of REACH in Social Media. If you are one of those keyboard warriors, who’s been trying to reach out to the netizens – this piece of content will guide you to decode the Social Media Reach mystery.
What is Reach?
Reach can be understood as the measure of influence your brand commands in the social media world. Reach is all about how much more likes, the likes that you already have, can potentially get you. In a strictly technical sense, it is the potential audience for a message posted on your social stream based on the number of followers your brand has on various social media streams. In a purely mathematical sense, Reach is the number of unique authors referencing your brand divided by the total number of mentions. It is the single most effective analytics tool to judge the performance of your social media campaign. The higher the number of followers the higher the number of potential interactions you can have.
How Does Social Media Reach Work?
Now you know what Reach exactly is. But if it is still just a bunch of numbers associated with your social media accounts, then you might want to read more. Broadly, Reach is the number of people who can see your online posts but the definition changes slightly from platform to platform. Facebook’s Reach is a bit different than Twitter’s Reach which is again a bit different than Google Plus’ reach.
Though, Reach is really just a bunch of number, it will still impact your online marketing campaign more than any other single factor. Here’s how:
Social Media Reach On Facebook
Facebook evaluates your brand’s performance using two key metrics – Impressions and Reach. Impression is the total number of times a post from your page is displayed, irrespective of whether it is clicked or not. People may see multiple impressions of the same post – for instance, when you see the post after someone from your friends list has shared it.
Reach, on the other hand, is the number of people who saw the impressions of your post on their feed. Reach can often be lesser than the number of Impressions as one person can see multiple impressions. Moreover, Facebook further categorizes Reach – Organic, Viral and Paid. That’s another post for another day. However, the important thing here is to realize what Reach can do to your brand on Facebook. It can be the difference between a “thumbs-up” or thumbs-down for your page and thus your campaign.
Social Media Reach On Google+
Google+ doesn’t officially use Reach as a metric but it can still give you a broad view of how your marketing campaign will perform on Google+. In Google+, Reach can be understood by taking account of how many communities you actively interact in. The more the number of communities you socialize with, the more the number of eyeballs for your online content.
Social Media Reach On Twitter
Facebook is the only social media platform that defines Reach as their analysis metric. But Reach plays an even more vital role on the Blue-Birdie. Twitter works on the concept of followers. Your followers see everything you tweet and retweet. This makes having a wider Reach even more decisive. On Twitter, Reach is directly related to the number of followers you have. Reach is basically your follower’s followers. Every single post that your followers retweet, your follower’s followers get a chance to retweet, thus increasing your brand’s exposure.
In the web-verse, Social Media Reach is of critical importance. It directly affects the sharing volume of your online content. It dictates the number of tweets your brand will get, the amount of time you’ll be the talk of the town and how well your campaign fares. It increases your business’ ability to get found and generate leads, it helps extend your online footprint as a business leader, and so much more.
What Affects Reach & How To Improve It?
Irrespective of the platform, your online campaign is directly affected by the number of people who were following your brand (Reach) before you started the campaign. However there are subtle differences across platforms.
Improving Social Media Reach On Facebook
On Facebook, the concept of Page reach is pretty simple – Your Fans are your Friends. The more the people who follow your page, the more the Reach of online brand. In order to increase your page reach, you need to keep following things in mind::
Consider The Content You Share On Facebook
To generate significant buzz, you need to consider the content you share on your page. Sharing a huge amount of content at once is the quickest way to be ignored to anonymity. Keep in mind when your audience is active and your competitors are not, that is generally the best time to post your content.
Step Up Your Image Game
Image posts are generally more shareable than simple posts. Humans are visual by nature. We are more fascinated by colorful images than a bunch of text. People find it easier to share a funny post than a serious marketing tagline. Be short, funny and willing to pick up the paintbrush. On an average, an image post has a 50% more probability of getting retweets than a post with no image.
Engage With Your Audience
Posting content when majority of your audience is snoozing is the best way to losing. Be mindful of your audience’s taste, sleeping pattern and aesthetic sense. And talk with them. If you want a like, ask for one. If you want them to share a post, ask them to do it.
Improving Social Media Reach On Google+
Reach is simply the number of communities you regularly interact in. The more the number of communities, the more the likelihood of getting brand exposure. Not getting the attention you want on the Big Plus, here’s what you can do to get the ‘1’s rolling.
Pick A Theme
Variety is the spice of life. But when it comes to Google+, variety can often times be the salt in your tea – a dampener. Choose a broad theme for you Google+ page and stick to it. It’ll take a bit longer to gain some traction but once you stop rolling, you’ll never ever gather any moss.
Multiple Circles
Google+ is made of communities. It is more of an identity platform than a social communication one like Facebook and Twitter. Posting in different communities gives your brand the much desired exposure and hence a larger reach.
Ask Questions
Involving your target customers in a discussion related to your brand’s domain can be very helpful in focusing large number of eyeballs onto your brand. Making the customers air their opinions about your brand will also help you learn how to improve your brand image across target groups.
Improving Social Media Reach On Twitter
On Twitter, the concept of Reach becomes a bit tricky. Having large number of followers is more like a line in the sand. Having followers who have larger number of followers is more essential than just having a large number of followers. If your follower count is high but your follower’s follower count is low, then it isn’t of much use. But conversely, if your follower count is low but your follower’s follower count is high, then it leads to a higher Reach.
Twitter is a trickier platform than the other two. But if you follow these tips, your brand should be turning some serious heads (not the Trainspotting kind, we hope)
Use Hashtags
Hashtag is your friend. The seemingly harmless symbol can do some serious lead generation when it comes to Twitter. Use hashtags like doctors recommend alcohol – everyday but in moderation. Using more than two hashtags will decrease your engagement by an average of 17 percent. Hashtags enable you to focus on your target audience and manifold the likelihood of generating higher Reach.
Be Funny & Interact With Your Audience
Twitter, in general, appreciates humor. The character limit ensures shorter posts but it is even better if your tweets can lead to some laughing fits. But one should always be wary of posting tweets that might be offensive to a certain section of the populace. It doesn’t take much for your mentions tab to go from ‘hahaha’s to ‘boo’s on Twitter. Also interacting with your target audience as well as industry leaders of your brand’s domain might provide you the much needed boost in your popularity.
Trending Topics
Tweeting about random stuff comes easy but it is also less likely to bring any fruitful results. However, tweeting about what the whole populace is chirping about can be very useful to get into the limelight and thus expose your brand to potential customers. Choose location specific trends that focus on your customers.
We did an Infographic that will give you a detailed insight into how you can improve Social Media Reach for your Brand. We hope you like it! Let us know in the comments section below:-
Tools To Measure Page Reach
Multiple analysis tools are available for Social Media Analysis on the web. But if you really want to do the analysis like pros, then read on ::
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that gives a detailed analysis of your Google Plus page’s performance. It presents insights such as views, followers along with detailed analysis such as the demographic classification of your followers, number of upvotes etc.
Facebook Analytics
Facebook Analytics is the best tool to measure the page reach of your brand on the Social Network. It allows you to view your performance metrics, which you can view in various segments, ranked according to various parameters such as Demography, Location etc.
HootSuite Analytics
HootSuite is a third-party analytics tool for analyzing the performance of your online campaign across various social media platforms such as Twitter, Google+ etc. Along with the analysis, it also ties social campaigns to revenue generation.
Sociota For Social Media
Sociota is another underdog in Social Media Analytics tool. It has some very unique features that most Social media tools do not have. We recommend giving Sociota a look.
How Social Media Transforms Brands?
Social Media is a powerful tool. Over the years, multiple brands – both big and small, have used social media as their platform to dive into the ocean of internet success. If you have even an iota of doubt over how social media can do wonders for your brand fortunes, then take a look at these online campaigns that went viral.
Here is an infographic by our good friends @Wishpond that shows 5 prominent brands who used Twitter to their advantage and turned heads.
Facebook can be an amazing marketing tool too. Multiple brands have used Facebook to widen their brand reach and to expand their business.
Motorcycle Helmet Art from Biltwell, Inc.
Biltwell makes motorcycle accessories, and they also made great engagement happen on their Facebook page. They asked their fans to submit new creative designs, with the winning design being used by the brand on their helmets.
Check out this example of the fan helmet art they routinely highlight, which encourages fan submissions and generates a feeling of togetherness around the brand.
Rotten Tomatoes on Google+
Posting articles and interesting content is a great use for Google+. Rotten Tomatoes keeps their page current with the latest “Tomatometers” and entertainment reviews.
They post almost every day on Google+, making sure that their connections always see what’s new. This campaign has been widely popular making Rotten Tomatoes rated as ‘Fresh’ in the How To Use Social Media’ section.
If you feel that in the first paragraph of this blog, we were talking about you. Then your brand surely needs a social media makeover and who better than us at Clixlogix to take your brand from the bottom of the social media ocean to the zenith of the web marketing world.
