The Basics of Social Media

Social media, for the most part, is a numbers game. You can either choose to play the game by numbers, or use it to concentrate on pushing valuable content.

The number of followers you have will tell you the number of people who potentially wish to connect with your brand, and can determine the reach your message has. The more followers you have, the more clicks you get, the better opportunity of promoting your brand. Clicks determine if what you are sharing is of interest to the user and they send referral traffic to your website.

Buying followers will give you numbers & can look impressive, but unless you gain as many organic followers you haven’t achieved much. You will also find that bought followers have very little value these days.

You want people to like your posts and your ‘pages’, but likes aren’t the only thing you want. They are just one audience. You also want your followers to share/retweet your posts, which exponentially increases your rate of clicks and more traffic to your website. You are also exposing your brand to people who aren’t your followers, who in turn can expose you to their followers too, and so on.

It’s important to understand what your page’s metrics and post behaviours mean to you. Are your posts are generating traffic to your website? Or are people just liking what you have to say? Can you change your strategy to achieve the desired result?

However, if you are still in the learning phase, you need to know a few basic terminologies:

Follower growth

People follow/like you because they may find the content you share interesting or would like to show affiliation for your brand. Sometimes it can be because they like the way you think, or who/what you show affiliation for. People draw a lot of conclusions from the amount or type of followers or the depth of reach your brand has infiltrated. As your followers grow, your influence spreads both in the number of people who will potentially follow your brand and their perception of your brand.

Engagement

Engagement is the total of likes, comments, shares, and clicks ... every interaction with the post. It indicates the post’s effectiveness. If response to your post is favourable, the engagement will be high, no matter what the interaction.

Reach & Impressions

Reach changes between social networks. On Facebook it’s how many people you reach, on Twitter it’s how many impressions. It is a metric which displays how many people have seen the content you shared, regardless of how many followers you have.

Clicks

Clicks mean that people are going to your website. So a great image & a good headline will make visitors want to click on the link of the post you shared. You want clicks.

Social referral traffic

Social referral traffic shows you how successful each social network is for referring traffic to your website. This includes links you shared & any links shared by others on social networks. Compare referral traffic, organic traffic, and direct traffic to put the impact of social media into perspective.

Funnel reports

These show clicks & referral traffic to your website or page. They show where traffic is going & what the user ends up doing. It will show you what social media traffic has been converted into leads, subscribers and into sales. The funnel report follows the whole journey from the post/tweet to the visitor’s final action.

Influencers

A social media influencer has access to a large audience. Influencers can be editors, journalists or bloggers, celebrities or people who are highly regarded in society social circles, marketplaces or industries. It can be cool to know that someone influential is following you & is a great vanity metric. However, there is a practical value to it too. Any social media post of yours has the potential to reach among their followers. Just be careful to research any influencers you’re interested in using. Artificial inflated followers can mean they are nothing more than freebie hunters, who endorse you in return for your products or services.