The Social Media Engagement Snowball

by Jeremy Krakowski

Why is engagement more important than the amount of followers you have on Social Media?

It’s a snowball effect that a lot of advertisers and social media marketers ignore at the core level, but is the very foundation of how social media works.

It’s about human interaction.

If no one is interested in what you are talking about, those 500,000 followers on your page don’t mean anything, and your impact is that of a page with 5,000 followers.

But what does this matter to business? How does this convert to any impact in sales or revenue?

Would you rather have a page of 500,000 people and only 50 of them purchasing from you, or 50,000 of them purchasing from you? I would say 50,000 is a lot better than 50… 😉

The way social media works is, when someones profile starts liking or commenting on a post of yours (no matter what it is, doesn’t matter – it could be a cat video) – the social media platform shows that more more of what that page has to offer – because that person gave feedback that “hey, I like this page, and this person, and I’m interested in what they post”.

If your posting a billboard message to buy your product on social media, but no one is liking, commenting or sharing, they won’t see much of anything else you post because:

1.) They aren’t interested in what you post (can’t change that – because you can’t change people)
2.) They like comment and share the things they care about.

Now a lot of people don’t take these as positive clues. Many would look at this as negative. This actually tells us how to fix the problem:

1.) We need to post more of what they are interested in for them to see the other things that you post
2.) Maybe we need to target a different set of followers who are interested in what you have to offer (for example, stay at home moms and CEOs are not interested in the same things all the time).

You are getting clues by your engagement of how to tweak your posts for your follower.

Let’s say you have a post that got shared 5000 times. Theres another clue. Post more stuff like that! People like it! Your demographic just told you what they want.

This creates a snowball effect, when they engage with you on social media (like, comment, or share), they will see more of what you post, and in turn, when it comes to you offering something for sale, if it’s along the lines of that target audience, they will actually see it and a percentage of them will come back to buy.

You can’t shove your product down peoples throats and spam their newsfeed with what you think they need to hear and expect a result. Instead you need to give people what they actually want, not what you THINK they want ,over 90% of the time on social media to get engagement. Then the other 10% will have the profitable “sales” or other impact that you are looking for.

By focusing on actually posting content people engage with instead of just “what makes me the most money and sales” your sales numbers actually go up in a weird balancing act that goes opposite of what you would think actually works.

Posting more about what you want to sell and get your message out there actually causes less people to engage and look at what you are selling.

Jeremy Krakowski, Media Director at ARC

Follow me on Twitter @jeremykrak