Any online marketer worth their salt must measure the success of a campaign. These days, social media platforms offer two kinds of metrics: reach and engagement.
In this post, we’ll examine the difference between reach and engagement. We’ll also see where influencer marketing works best, and how it can benefit your next campaign.
What is the Difference Between Reach and Engagement?
In this example, we’ll use Facebook as our platform of choice, but it works in the same way with YouTube, Twitter or Instagram. Quite simply, reach is how many people see your post in their News Feed. Engagement is how many people interact with it.
Now this interaction can take many forms. It can be a share, a comment, or even just a click on a link. There is also a “time” element to it, as Facebook measures how frequently users react to your content. The calculations are pretty complex, but this is the general gist of it.
Which is the Best Metric for My Campaign?
It depends on what you want to do. For instance, if you want to promote brand awareness, reach is absolutely fine. More people will get to know the name of your product, which is a goal in and of itself.
But for the majority of the cases, engagement reaps the higher rewards. In fact, it is worth creating content that has low reach but high engagement. This is because the Facebook algorithms favour content creation. So a post that has a long thread of replies is more likely to be placed higher than one with two likes. Each reply is considered additional content, which means a virtuous cycle of likes, replies and shares.
Although you can find all kinds of complex equations on the subject, reach does not always mean interaction. But a good engagement rate definitely leads to more exposure.
How is Influencer Marketing Good for Engagement?
Out of all the online marketing methods you can use, influencers are some of the best at creating engagement. This is thanks of a number of reasons, including the fact that:
- Influencers have more followers: the higher number of people who will see a post, the more chances there is of it spreading and creating replies.
- Influencers create communities around themselves: whether you call them followers or a fanbase, influencers know how to rally people around their content. This means feedback, reactions, and sometimes even debates.
- Influencers add a “human touch”: Would you rather discuss a product with a faceless social manager, or someone who feels like your friend? This is exactly why influencers have a much higher engagement success rate than traditional advertising.
Final Thoughts
As you have now seen, influencer marketing is not just a great tool for creating user engagement. It is the best marketing weapon in your arsenal. By tapping into the communities of users who surround them, marketers will know exactly how to foster responses, feedback and conversation around your product.
And best of all, favouring engagement does not mean sacrificing reach. In fact, social media algorithms are designed to find high engagement and promote it. If you use influencer marketing, it’s easy to see how this can quickly it can snowball to make your message viral.
