DigiMythz: Post not engaging enough? Let's promote it.

Ques. So why do you want to promote your post on Social Media?

Ans. 1 - I want to tell people about my product/brand/service. The people who might have not even heard about it otherwise. Hmmm, Sounds Good.

Ans. 2 - I want to reach out to people who have not liked my brand/product/service page. Right.

Ans. 3 - My post was not otherwise getting engagement, pouring in a bit money might help. Radically Wrong approach.

Before we get into the 'Whys' and 'Hows', let us first know a few facts about Facebook (Source: Wisemetrics and Facebook)

• 75% of engagement on a post occurs within first 5 hours of posting
• 75% of audience sees the message in less than 2 hours of posting
• A post gets to 50% of its global reach in just 30 minutes
• In order to show high quality content and clean up news feed, Facebook just shows approximately 300 posts out of up to 15,000 potential posts (avg 1,500) that could be shown once a user logs in.

So what do we deduce from here?

• Any post on Facebook stales out very fast.
• The Organic reach of a post is quite low. A post reaches to just, as low as, 2% followers on Facebook.

What drives the reach of a post?

1. No. of times our followers log in – More the times they login higher is the probability that they'll see our post
2. The time when a post is made – The chances of a higher reach are more if we make the post when maximum followers are online. This input is given by Facebook Insights.
3. Reach out to the non-follower TG on Facebook – This is done through Sponsored posts.
4. Engagement on the post – Depends upon the type of post. A shareable post with a clear CTA (“Buy Now” is not a very engaging CTA). Gamification is the key. (Stay tuned for more blogs on Gamification)

Out of the above four, except the 1st one, the rest can be manipulated by the brand. The engagement on a post is a function of just 2 parameters:

• The theme of the post - What are we trying to say?
• The tone/type of post - How do we say it?

Post-promotion does not help creating engagement.

What does Post-Promotion do for us?

The target of Paid promotion is not to get more engagement on the posts which are not engaging as it does not affect the “average organic distribution”. The objective is to get a higher reach, by bringing more population under consideration from outside our captured audience, which may very likely increase the engagement numbers for us but may or may not increase the engagement/ reach ratios.

Average Organic Distribution is the parameter Facebook uses to rank the posts for being shown on the users feed. The parameter includes but is not limited to -

• The engagement history of the user with the host brand/product/service page
• Engagement on the post
• Number of potential posts at the instant of login/ refresh, etc

Few good practices:

1. Push your day's posts to or around the “Prime Time”, i.e. the time when maximum followers are online.
2. Instead of more “Buy Now” or info posts, gamify your posts. Ask the user to engage in ways that they would like.
3. Another type of posts which gain high engagement are Seasonal Wishes.
4. Use the posts which are shareable. Generally, the people are more interested in Specifications and Reviews, the posts which showcase these would have a higher tendency to be shared.
5. User generated content tends to catch a good number of eyeballs too.
6. Target the TG in parts. Targeting same TG again and again, gives the Ad a fatigue.
7. Timing plays an important role. Before promoting the post, please note the logging in behaviour of the TG. Start the promotion when you get the maximum TG online.

Hope this post gives you a perspective that helps create an effective well informed promotion strategy. Feel free to voice your concerns, give suggestions and share success stories with me as comments here. Also, you can mail your queries to [email protected].