I was reading a Jeff Bullas blog about the type of content posted in social media profiles and what engages audiences most and he raised a good point about reach (views) versus engagement (clicks, comments, shares). But let me go back a step.

Most of you would have read by now that Facebook fans or Twitter followers or number of people in your Google+ Circles is not the best way to measure an effective social media campaign or strategy. But do you know what you should be measuring instead?

Social Media Measurement

For twitter the measurement is often sentiment – how many positive brand mentions you have versus negative.
For facebook perhaps its best to measure engagement via comments and shares but I know from my personal life that very few people comment on my digital marketing blogs or share my facebook posts but often comment to me in person that they’re reading my blog almost every day and that its helping them get on with their digital marketing strategies. So rather than considering my facebook strategy unsuccessful, I acknowledge that there are online contributors, authors and critics but there are more passive observers overall, those who don’t engage, but simply consume. However, I still need to be able to measure my online engagements through analytics to make sure that I can make some objective observations.

This report shows the digital marketing content that was shared the most by my audience

Popular Digital Marketing Content

So, inspired by Jeff Bullas’ blog on the type of content that drives the most interaction on Facebook, I decided to take a deeper look at my own facebook content and which engagement objects got the best reaction from my small but important audience.

So I wanted to see what type of content was engaging my audience most in terms of likes, comments, click throughs, shares and general interaction. In Facebook’s analytics tool, called Insights, this comes under the title “Engaged Users”. The top piece of content I posted that engaged my audience was an image.

This social media strategy image got the most interaction from my Facebook audience

The image was of an infographic of a social media content strategy. The text below it was empathising with small businesses and non-digital people struggling to create a social media content strategy.

As an aside, this image featured in the top 5 social media content that got people talking/ sharing via facebook as well. Interestingly, it did not get a high reach (meaning that there were much fewer views of this image – which may be due to the time of day it was posted – perhaps it was at a time when there was a lot of facebook activity and it was filtered very quickly).

Other social media content that engaged my specific digital marketing interest audience, were videos. I often post a “Happy Friday” video of some inspiring advertising or marketing campaign that I think ticks all the boxes required to be considered a successful digital marketing campaign. The T-Mobile “Welcome Back” video, which I find absolutely brilliant because its a perfect message, in the right place, at the right time and it is uplifting which means the users will have a brilliant brand experience and talk about this for years, was the piece of content that engaged my audience most through facebook. The video is below:

When comparing the top 5 engaging posts across Reach, Engagement and “Talking about” (which means sharing), I was surprised not to see more cross over in the type of content or blog posts that were popular with my audience. The only consistency I could see was that survey/ poll questions (which was the highest reach [meaning it had the most views] of all of my content posted and I’ve only ever done 1 and only 6 people responded), images and video. It seems these hard slog blogs get very little traction as far as interest, clicks, shares etc.

This report shows the content I posted to facebook that received the most views, through news feed and sharing

Make sure you’re reading the data right

But my content strategy is several layers deep and I don’t let Facebook Insights deter me from my end goal of creating an online presence that cements me as a digital marketing expert. The blog posts create content that drives links to me and my profile, it brings search engines and it builds confidence with my clients that I know what I’m talking about. A blog also helps those smal businesses and entrepreneurs who are looking for information and advice but can’t afford to pay a consultant for it.

The moral of the story is, analytics and insights are great. But you have to know how to read the measurements and how to incorporate the learnings into your digital marketing strategy and help to improve it, rather than derail it.