Many franchise owners and marketing teams often ask the question, “How can we increase our social media followers?” Fan growth is a
But fan growth does not matter if your audience is not consuming the content you have to offer. For example, if you have 70,000 fans but you post something and it gets zero engagement, your followers actually have zero value.
Is your goal brand awareness as well as building a relationship with your audience? If so, engagement is more important than Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Here are some more reasons why engagement may be more important than fan growth for your franchise.
Engagement Impacts the Visibility of Content
If your goal is to increase awareness of your franchise, then engagement is more important than reach. Engagement impacts the visibility of content as it influences the probability of your audience seeing your posts their Facebook feed. Shares also help build customer confidence in your franchise.
And one of the most important facets of engagement is shares as shares influence how many users see your posts. Content that comes from friend and family comes before fan page content on Facebook, which has made it more important than ever to build content that users want to share.
Additionally, reactions are an important but neglected component. Reactions actually convey a stronger signal that followers want to see posts more so than if they simply “like” the post. It takes more time to react to a post than it does to “like” it, so you should strive to create content that encourages reactions.
Engagement Signifies How Well Your Audience Relates to Your Content
In order to build a relationship with your franchise audience, you should stay focused on engagement. Facebook uses algorithms to identify which content your audience is most interested in. If your content does not resonate with your audience, they may hide your post or report it as spam (or even hide all of your posts from their feed). If you generate content that receives negative feedback, your stories may not only be invisible today in users’ feeds but may also not be in the future.
Higher Engagement Impacts Your ROI
ROI is also important as it is a huge factor for marketers. The good news is that higher engagement can positively impact your social media ROI, thanks to Facebook relevance scores. These scores are based on positive and negative feedback (or engagement) that ads receive. This means that the more people engage with your content, the cheaper it becomes to boost it!
Engagement is one of many metrics. Although measuring engagement alone cannot tell you everything you need to know about your audience, focusing on engagement rather than quantity of followers will do your franchise justice.