“It ain’t about how many ‘believe’ you, it’s just about how many hear”

Photo from Unsplash

By Tom

There has been a big shift recently in the way that people are now interacting with companies on social media platforms. Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Facebook will be moving away from business-focused posts and feeds in order to make users’ social media experience more personal and centered around your friends.

This all spells a serious shift in strategy for companies that are present on social media. The shift is only further highlighted by the constantly changing social media algorithms: Facebook page posts are now only guaranteed to reach 1% of one’s audience, Instagram posts are now only shown once in users’ feeds, and Twitter posts’ success are highly dependent on timing and trending hashtags.

This shift is also clear in the type of paid promotions now available to social media users. Gone are the days where the number of page followers were a business’s key metric because this no longer  guarantees engagement. Examples of companies that had this old type of thinking are visible everywhere.

So what’s the answer? We suggest starting with the campaign’s priorities and then looking at the way that these platforms now present their paid promotions, focusing clearly on promotions geared for increased awareness versus following. One of the newest platforms, Instagram, doesn’t even offer paid promotions geared at growing your following. The reason for this is that, despite what these platforms might tell you, bot accounts are still a massive issue for all platforms. The internet is littered with stories of small business owners who ran paid promotions to get followers, and ended up with thousands of accounts following them that weren’t even listed on the same continent.

What does a paid promotion geared towards awareness entail? Impressions are the name of the game here, which quite simply refers to how many eyes have seen a post. For some, this metric alone is key. ABSA and their recent logo revamp is a perfect example of this. I myself don’t follow them on social media, but I know about the new logo because of the paid social media promotions that they ran. They’re top of mind now when I think about banks.

However, impressions alone aren’t always everything. If so many people are seeing a post, it’s just as important to gauge their reaction. This is where engagements come in; measuring a post’s likes, shares, comments and click-throughs gives us an indication of the content’s reception, and therefore is a more valuable metric than impressions.

For all paid social media promotions, the end goal must always be at the forefront of your thinking. With this goal you have to think about your KPIs: How many impressions do you want on social media? How many click-throughs? What would you measure as a conversion on social media, and how many do you want? It’s with all of this in mind that you’ve got to create your content.