Week 6, Post 1: Reach vs. Engagement in Social Media

  "Post Reach" is a metric as to how many users viewed one's post on social media. "Reach" is related to, but similar to "impressions" in advertising. "Impressions" relates to how many times a piece of media was viewed, while "Reach" refers to the number of people who saw it. Therefore, if only one person sees the same message one thousand times, the message received 1,000 impressions, but had a "reach" of 1. This differentiation is possible with Facebook because Facebook serves every piece of media to a particular user, who has registered with Facebook and logged-in at that time, and so the impression can be tagged to a particular user.    

  "Post Engagement", on the other hand -- and here is where social media diverges from traditional media like print, radio, television, billboards and posters -- indexes the number of users who not only viewed the message, but interacted with it. As Facebook uses the term, "engagement" refers to any interaction, whether brief or extended. The least significant engagement is clicking the "Like" button, or clicking on the post to view the entire article, which usually opens into a different browser window. Comments and "Shares", on the other hand, are among the most significant forms of engagement. A "Share" incorporates that post into the Newsfeed of the user that shared it, and also the newsfeed of the most avid friends and followers of the user. In this way, a "Share" electronically disseminates a message through the Facebook accounts of potentially hundreds and thousands of users.

ln days of yore, a "Like" would cause the post and even an advertisement to appear in the margin of the Facebook friends of the user that "liked" the post, e.g., "Hannah Miyamoto liked Starbucks." However, this was eventually viewed as "too creepy" and users were given the option to disable this "permission" in their profiles. Facebook is even experimenting with stopping "Likes" from appearing in the newsfeeds of friends of the user that "liked" the post or page, to prevent what it calls "Like Envy," or jealousy at others who post material that is more popular.

It is important to remember that the newsfeed of a Facebook member usually only announces the activities of users with whom the member interacts to most, not just all his or her Facebook friends. If your distant Aunt Agatha asks you why you never like or share her cat photos, the most likely reason is that you haven't given any posts from Aunt Agatha a like, share, or comment recently (if ever), and as a result, your newsfeed does not report what Aunt Agatha is doing.  

On the other hand, when Facebook first gave users the ability to receive notifications about ALL of their Facebook friends, I experimented with not filtering my newsfeed. The experiment stopped soon because I found that my newsfeed was populating with more messages faster than I could read them and still be productive at doing anything else! Consequently, I value the filtering feature of Facebook for keeping me in touch with whom I regularly interact, and not distracting me with news about everyone with whom I rarely interact.

Social media users that want to increase their influence through social media, as well as use social media as earned media to promote their business or organization need to know the difference between reach and engagement metrics, especially when analyzing them in their Facebook Insights page. Media with a very wide reach -- particularly if achieved through paid advertising -- may be seen by many people, but motivate few if anyone to act on it. On the other hand, media may have an extremely high engagement rate -- such as an intensely-active comment thread -- but reach only a handful of people.

Generally, a Facebook user seeking to increase their influence and use Facebook as earned media should focus on "engagement," since shared media is more likely to be shared by friends of that user, while un-shared media is apparently having little to no impact if no one deems it worthy of sharing.

The Facebook Insights on a business page can be used to determine which items are of most interest to the customers of a business, and which merely "bounce off" of them. 

For example, a business could post a notice \inviting customers to click on it to open a page on the business website presenting a code word they can use for a 10% discount on their purchases that day. This would cost the business approximately nothing, other than the reduced sales revenue from honoring the discount. If that post received (relatively) many clicks, the business would know that its customers value discounts. Moreover, users that shared the post could be identified as users that think they have many friends who would also enjoy patronizing the business. Both clicking and sharing are forms of engagement. The "engagement" of the post can be divided by its "reach" to determine the relative engagement rate to the post. 

On the other hand, if that post was largely ignored, the business would know that discounting its products, or at least, that product, is relatively unimportant.

It is important to remember that like all marketing tools, the "reach" and "engagement" from Facebook-served media is only an indication of the real situation. Moreover, since Facebook serves media by targeting those to whom its computers think it will appeal to the most, results from Facebook media are not drawn from a randomly-selected sample. On the other hand, having some relevant data is better than conducting a business with none at all.