In today’s social media-driven world, it’s easy to get caught up in the numbers game. We see Person A with 10,000 followers and Person B with 100,000 followers and immediately think that Person B must be more influential, more popular, and just generally better than Person A.
But that’s not always the case. In fact, when it comes to the impact of your posts, you might actually have more power than LinkedIn influencers. Here’s why.
Reach vs. Engagement
In the age of social media, reach has become an important metric. Brands want to partner with influencers who have a large number of followers in the hopes that those followers will also be interested in what the brand has to offer.
Social media engagement is the total number of likes, comments, shares, and general interactions a piece of content or social media account receives relative to the size of the audience. Having a large following isn’t useful if the audience isn’t regularly interacting with the content they follow. (source: Hubspot)
“No matter the scale of your business or social audience, quality engagement is what I always focus on. Where best-in-class social media marketing is a delicate balance behind providing your audience value while meeting business needs, your engagement rate is an indicator if you’re tipping the scales in the wrong direction. Audience first.” (source: Hubspot) According to Kelly Hendrickson, Senior Manager of Social Media at HubSpot, engagement is a crucial metric for understanding social media performance.
How to Understand Your Impact
Just because somebody has a large number of followers it doesn’t mean that those followers are actually engaged with that person’s content. In fact, many people simply follow a large number of accounts and only pay attention to the content of a small handful. For brands, this means that it is more important to focus on engagement than on reach. Partnering with an influencer who has a smaller but more engaged following can be more effective than working with somebody who has a large but inactive following.
Let me demonstrate this with five examples of LinkedIn users whose posts appear in my LinkedIn…
