While it can be easy to get caught up in the excitement of seeing your newest post rake in the likes from your followers, it’s important to consider all measurement metrics across your social media channels before you get too caught up in the likes.
In years gone by, the main way of measuring your success on your Instagram or Facebook page would be a quick glance at the ‘likes’ figure to see how it was performing. While many people who have been working in the social media industry for a while now may still look to this number as the main KPI for their channels, it’s time to look at the bigger picture! With all the improvements in both Facebook and Instagram’s reporting data, there’s much more intricate detail that can give you a better idea of how your consumers are engaging with the content you’re putting out there, and more exact ways to measure how effective your posts are at retaining their attention.
Retention of Attention
Some of the most important changes to the insight features on platforms such as Instagram is the Completion rate and Watch time. For example, if you’ve posted an Instagram story with multiple slides, and want to see how many people were interested enough to click through the whole story, there are many ways to check this. Your chosen social analytics platform should be able to separate the actions taken on your stories into 4 main categories: Replies, Taps back, Taps forward and Exits, as well as providing a Completion Rate on the viewing of each story you post. While Stories were previously the black sheep of the social media family due to having no visible likes connected to them, the rise of Stories as a quick and easy platform for brands to get a message out is further proof that the insights provided in lieu of ‘likes’ are providing brands with a better idea of their customer engagement and retention than static posts purely for the sake of likes.
Likes Do Not Equate to Social Proof
If you’ve ever been bored and endlessly scrolling your Facebook or Instagram feed (let’s be honest, we all do this constantly) then you know how easily you will give your ‘like’ away to any post regardless of content. With everyone being active on their phones, and using it as a tool to pass the time, the impact of your ‘like’ grows less meaningful as time goes by. Many of us will absent-mindedly tap the like button out of force of habit rather than a proper connection to the content we’re viewing. While the term ‘social proof’ is thrown around a lot, some of the main phenomenons of social proof are primarily based on the visible recommendations of experts or other customers regarding your product or service. With the numerical value of likes no longer being present directly under an image, the previous impact of the ‘number of likes’ on your immediate social proof is lost on your viewer. Instead, the next highest impact can be found in the comments section. Encouraging your audience to engage with your content by commenting on your posts is a much more effective way of appealing to a new follower who has just started looking through your posts to see what your company is all about. If you’re interested in a new product or service, who are you more likely to trust: The page with an unknown amount of ‘likes’ and no comments, or a page with some likes and multiple comments from other customers commenting about how great the brand or product is?
It’s 2020, there’s more important insights to be marking your success with other than organic likes on your photos, so make sure you’re getting the most out of your social media – contact OMDIGI Group today! We can sort your business out with a wide range of social media services, ranging from Organic Content Creation to Paid Social Advertising, our team will always endeavour to provide the best results and the smart strategies so you can tap into your desired target audience as fast as possible!
