Social media has opened up the potential audience reach for business content, but is size everything?
Some metrics feel important, and going viral is no doubt a buzz, but it can be fruitless if the right people aren’t seeing and responding to your content.
On the very few occasions I’ve gone what could possibly be considered viral on LinkedIn, it’s mostly ended up in more ‘random’ people seeing my content and a raft of spammy comments.
Yes, you want your content to be seen, but quality should trump quantity.
The best audience for your content
I was recently asked to talk to the marketing team of a European commercial property developer about press relations and tactics for getting more coverage.
One question asked was about the value of getting press coverage on a freely accessible news website versus coverage on a site behind a subscription paywall.
Freely accessible might imply there is a bigger audience, but that doesn’t mean more people or even the right people will see your quote or op-ed.
If someone has subscribed to a website, they are already invested in the type of content being published.
It is also highly likely that the publisher will send subscribers emails with the latest headlines or round-ups of key stories and articles.
That means the news story or article you appear in is going into the inbox of an already engaged audience, so it arguably stands a better chance of being read.
The question is whether you would rather the piece you’ve been quoted in appear in the inbox of a smaller number of engaged readers or an unknown number that may or may not be interested.
Invested audience vs generic
Another comparison is your own newsletter versus LinkedIn. You may have, say, 200 subscribers, an audience already likely to be invested in what you have to say.
Newsletter platforms generally give you the open rate, so you’ve got a good idea of the proportion of subscribers who engaged.
Similar content posted on LinkedIn might get, say, 500 impressions, but unless people have directly engaged – commented, etc – you have no idea how many have seen it, let alone read it.
Yep, LinkedIn impressions don’t mean the actual number of views or reads; it’s the number of feeds your piece of content has appeared in – people could easily have just scrolled by.
What LinkedIn metrics mean
Which leads me on to the fact that not all LinkedIn stats are created equal. Impressions and likes are ultimately shallow metrics. But there is a whole raft of other data points which show more meaningful engagement.
Comments are one because it shows that people have read at least some of what you’ve written.
Other stats include the number of saves, shares or sends – indicators that your post was deemed worthwhile enough to come back to or pass on to others.
You can also see how many people viewed your profile on the back of individual posts. A sign that you’ve piqued their interest in some way.
Cross-reference that with who is viewing your profile, and you can see if your content is reaching the right audience.
If you had a link in your post, there is even a stat for how many people clicked on it.
Meaningful engagement
This meaningful engagement is more telling.
And, like the behind-the-paywall scenario, I would argue that a low level of meaningful engagement with the right audience is better than possibly, maybe, reaching a generic audience.
Or to put it another way, if 100 people came to see you do a talk on the same topic as your content, you’d likely be pretty chuffed.
Final thoughts
Given the vagaries of algorithms, chasing a smaller but more engaged and relevant audience feels like a more fruitful endeavour than striving to grow a generic audience unlikely to deliver on business goals.
What do you think?
• How is your business’s content performing? Is it getting the engagement and outcomes you want? Get in touch about my content reviews, strategy sessions and support with writing.
More audience-related content:
Audience engagement: Lessons from lemons
Quick content tip about better audience engagement
Audience engagement and what we can learn from theatre
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