A new engagement metric revealing the quality and the potential of your posts
The standard engagement is calculated out of fanbase but this approach is not optimal nowadays because of two facts:
- A post reaches just a small fraction of your community: therefore it's sort of unfair to evaluate the interaction of your fans if only a percentage (typically lower than 10%) of them has actually seen your post.
- Brands invest in Facebook Ads to boost post reach: then the target reached can be way bigger than your actual fanbase and the type of audience can differ substantially accordingly to the type of campaign.
A brand can artificially tune the figures of engagement by boosting a post, then obtaining a substantial number of interactions (likes, comments, shares) and generating the impression that the content it's actually good and relevant to the community.
In reality to optimize content for an audience is much more convenient to measure engagement out of reach with a KPI that we call Reach Engagement.
In the early stages of a publication, when few people have been reached yet and few of them have interacted with the post, we can already understand if a post is performing well by checking its Reach Engagement. Depending on the type of industry and of content we can rely on benchmark values of Reach Engagement to guide the decision wether to invest on Facebook Ads or not.
We can also discover clever correlations between content consumption, sentiment and Reach Engagement: this means that we start to understand the reactions of our community and we are able to predict the results of a campaign accordingly to our objectives.
It's extremely useful to track the evolution of Reach Engagement while promoting a post because this way we can offer relevant content to our audience (without spamming) and we can assure our budget is invested properly since Facebook will keep the CPM and CPC low if content is working well in the news feed.
Ideally in a Facebook Ads campaign while reaching a broader audience Reach Engagement should remain stable or anyhow above our benchmark level for a "good post". In the meanwhile we will be accumulating new interactions and the value of engagement will keep growing.
If we observe a decrease of Reach Engagement it means that we expanded the audience of our post so much that our content is not relevant for our target any longer. Then it would be a good idea to stop the campaign and adjust the Ad Segmentation.
Reach Engagement is your best friend to discover the content that works better for your community and to optimize the ROI of your Ads campaigns.
