How healthy are your Likes, Comments, Shares?

Leigh PlowmanLeigh Plowman loves helping Independent Optometrists do more online! As a practicing Optometrist, Leigh shares weekly tips and ideas from his experience with www.goggleman.com.au Learn how to grow your Practice Website and Social Media presence. Reach patients who need you!

Engagement

Optometry Social Media Marketing

Ready to publish another cool post?

Your finger is hovering over the ‘Post’ button. Your image is attention grabbing, serious, fun or just plain awesome. Your team loved your post idea, helping you to take the image or refine it.

This is going to be popular and help new patients to know who you are. Even before they step foot in your practice.

And then, it’s quiet….

The internet becomes like slow motion. A bit like the shot on goal just before the buzzer….

Will you get more Likes, Comments and Shares on this post than the last one?

On Facebook, Shares, Comments and Likes are becoming increasingly valuable.

In late 2014, Trackmaven analysed 8,800 brands/businesses across five major social media networks. From the graph below, you can see the declining number of interactions per post (i.e. purple line). Also, the increasing number of posts by brands (aqua line):

The following year, Trackmaven analysed 75.7 billion interactions, from 50 million pieces of content, produced by 22,957 brands. Key findings include that brands produced 35% more content, but that Engagement decreased by 17%. In essence, there’s more ‘noise’ to compete with.

Similarly, Tom Webster, from Edison Research, argues that although social media usage is increasing, it’s being outpaced by more content. Said another way, we only have a limited number of hours to spend on social media. It becomes harder for an audience to interact with all your posts. For example, if you add an extra 100 channels to your cable TV, doesn’t mean that you’ll proportionally increase your TV watching.

Between the networks, Instagram had the highest engagement per post, compared to Facebook and Twitter. That is (2.81%, 0.25% and 0.21% respectively), according to Buffer.

So, we’re all drinking from a fire-hydrant, right?

Yes, but Facebook wants us to continue to engage with their network.

We already know that they want to protect the ‘party-like’ atmosphere at all costs. That is, that we need to know that we can see what our friends are up to, without being bombarded by Ads. (The latter would be like watching ‘Home Shopping Network’ all day.)

However, Facebook also wants us to continue to engage with other brands. Facebook makes a huge amount of money from ads. USD$5.637 Billion in fact, between Oct-Dec 2015. Ads are assigned a Quality Score, based on how Facebook users engage with them. If the Ads don’t receive good feedback (or get negative feedback), then they don’t get shown as often. It’s in Facebook’s interests to improve engagement.

Facebook recently gave us more ways to interact with posts in February 2016. It launched Facebook Reactions. As you know, it gives five new ways to express emotion about a post, including Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry. This seems to be part of an effort to improve engagement.

Sure, Facebook was responding to user requests for something ‘beyond’ a like button. But it gives us a quick way of reacting to a post. And we’re being trained to start thinking again about how we react to a Facebook Post.

In your Practice, you can start to see which Facebook posts are getting Reactions. And whether the right people are Reacting to your posts in the right way. It’s still a little too early to say generally which is the best Reaction for Optometry Practices. We still want to know: does a “Love” Reaction drive more appointments to your Practice than a “Like”?

So, what can you do to boost Engagement?

Conclusion

It’s true! There’s a lot of content around. To succeed, you need to find your voice and resonate with your ideal patients.

And then listen for the sound of the ball ‘swishing’ the net or crossing the goal line.