Why is it so important to engage?

Social media totally changed the way brands communicate with their consumers. Their monologue turned into a dialogue with customers. Each of social media enables different way of engaging the audience that is one of the primary goals of all social media activities. To sum up, engagement shows whether a brand successes in provoking a reaction from the part of the audience which may constitute a carrier of viral content.

Open Forum confirms huge importance of engaging by quoting the data about the fact that every user engaged by activities within our Facebook page enables us to reach 30 new potential fans. Building fans engagement, brands aim to to provoke emotional reaction which potentially may turn into benefits for the brand itself such as promotion and brand recognition.

Engagement and its relation to the reach of posts

In every social media channel there is a mechanism selecting and promoting content. On Facebook it is Edge Rank – the algorithm deciding about positioning of news in users’ newsfeed.  Edge Rank significantly affects the reach of profile and individual posts. At the same time, posts not engaging so many fans will not be seen by the rest of them. Of course, sponsored stories are also very valuable when it comes to increasing engagement and reach.

First of all, engagement is connected with a way of running the profile and type of presented content. Number of fans is little less important, however, smaller profiles usually engage bigger percentage of fans.

Sotrender will measure the engagement

Sotrender enables measurement of fans’ engagement using 4 indexes, which will be described later:
–    Engaged users
–    People talking about this
–    Number of activities of different types
–    Interactivity index and related to it Relative Interactivity

Engaged users

Chart showing the engagement of fans

Engaged users are people that in certain time period were interacting with a Facebook page by clicking “like it” button, voting in survey (that option has been turned off for the majority of pages recently), posting a comment, adding a post or sharing content. Sotrender enables checking the number of engaged users, percentage of engaged users and number of newly engaged for specific day or changes in longer time period.

Above the graph you can see tabs allowing more specific investigation of the types of activities or fluctuation of percentage of engaged users in time.

Every chart shows data from days, weeks, days of week and hours. When you click on any point of given chart, there comes the screen that allows you to add comments or see every post from specific day.

People talking about this

Chart showing the number of people talking about it (PTAT)

People talking about this (PTAT) is the index introduced by Facebook. Our chart shows the change of this index in selected period of time.
Sotrender allows you to check, what was the average, the minimum and the maximum value of the index. Data is available for days and specific days of the week.

Types of activities

Chart showing the number and types of activities

The chart shows distribution of activities in time. By activities we mean clicking on the ‘like’ button, voting in a survey, adding comment or a post on a wall or sharing a post on user’s wall. In different tabs you can find cumulated activities, their types, as well as activities of admin and fans.
Data is available for hours, days and weeks.

Interactivity Index

Chart showing the Interactivity Index of a page

Interactivity Index is an index invented by Sotrender which counts all the activities occurring within a Facebook page. Every activity has its own weight, for example liking a post has smaller value than commenting it. Interactivity Index can be useful for comparing engagement created by different posts. Separating activities of fans from activities of admin can also give valuable information. Basing on Interactivity Index Sotrender counts value of Relative Interactivity, which can be used for comparing profiles with different numbers of fans.

Which metric of engagement for what purpose?

Every of our metrics is related to different aspect of engagement.
Number of engaged users shows how many people were interacting within a Facebook page. You can look at the percentage, however, especially for a short period of time, results won’t be stunning – many profiles engage only small percent of fans. At the same time, people that are not fans can also be engaged, therefore sometimes a pge engages more than 100% of its fans.

Interactivity Index and based on it Relative Interactivity Index are weighted indexes, which show the intensity of engagement. Sharing a post of a page with friends is entirely different activity than only liking the post. What’s more, one user is often engaged in more than one way, which results in the rise of Interactivity Index.

People Talking About This is the index, that doesn’t change so much in time. It is moving average, actualized once a day, and not refreshed every hour, like the rest. In this index all interactions on the page’s wall are taken into account and the most important of those are new fans liking a page. Because of this, the value of this index rises fast when a page becomes popular, which is for example caused by advertising campaign.