Social media marketing is growing to be one of the biggest marketing channels. It plays a huge role in branding, communication, thought leadership, lead generation and nurturing. Most of the companies across the globe irrespective of their size, geography, industry and target market, have social media business pages and post regularly. Do you wonder what happens after you post content, how many people saw it on their feed, how many read it and clicked links to learn further?
So at MarketBeam, we built a custom Reach Calculator for marketers to calculate potential organic social reach. This calculator takes into account your business pages’ current followers on major social networks. More importantly, how many individuals share business content with their networks. Because, more number of individuals sharing with network exponentially increases reach. If you haven’t implemented an employee advocacy solution yet, we can help! When you implement an employee advocacy program where all employees are given an opportunity to participate in social branding of their employer, social reach and engagement reaches its maximum heights!
In the absence of an employee advocacy tool to maximize engagement, you can only hope your followers like, comment or re-share your posts so you reach new audiences. It’s a natural practice that social media users who see branded posts on their feed do not re-share them. So, you need a plan instead of relying on those followers to bring you engagement. Employees are the best brand advocates, so utilize their networks to reach new audience on social media.
Inputs for Social Reach Calculator
1. Number of Employees
Every employee of the company should be encouraged to participate in social channels. When there is new post on the business page, employees who follow company feed will get a chance to read it and re-share it. However, in reality, employees will not be consistent in their actions. Our app, MarketBeam provides a very easy and automated way for all employees to share corporate approved content on multiple social networks. It’s important for sales, marketing, customer service and more importantly executive teams who have prospects and customers on their LinkedIn and other social network to re-share company posts. Employees build their own thought leadership and building personal branding when they consistently share quality posts produced by their marketing teams. This creates a true win-win for both employees and employers.
2. Current Social Media Followers
Social media page followers are your default audience for your posts. While entering your followers, make sure you choose number of Followers but not Likes. In most cases, these numbers match but not always. Remember posts will not reach all those that Like your page instead they need to explicitly follow you.
Number of employees and social network followers are the only two sets of inputs required to calculate potential organic social reach for your posts. However, the following are factored into our formula.
3. Participation Rate
Though this is not an input we ask our users to enter, we factor this important input. Let’s be honest about the participation from all employees. When employees are asked to share employer content on social networks, not everyone will participate. First of all, marketing team needs to educate all their peers about the thought leadership they build by participating. Social branding cannot be built over night. After sharing quality content and constantly participating for months or even years individuals rank high up within social networks. For example, if a LinkedIn user has #ArtificialIntelligence in her profile and shares content related to artificial intelligence consistently, there is a high chance that she ranks much higher than someone else with the same background with no social activities. These kind of search results help individuals connect with right people.
From our own data, we have seen up to 72% of employees participate at the higher end of the spectrum. However, on the lower end about 55%. So, we use 65% participation while calculating your social reach.
4. Connection Overlap
There is a high probability that many of your connections on LinkedIn are connected your other connections. Basically, this creates a social map that has overlapping connections. We consider 20% overlap based on MarketBeam data. Connection overlap is a good thing. For example, if I see 4 employees of Uber who are on my LinkedIn network share the same content, I pay more attention to the post. As you know, LinkedIn consolidates all those 4 posts under “People in you network are talking about ….”.
With your inputs and other factors, we calculate potential social reach. This is organic reach when employees and influencers that work with your brand amplify company content on their own networks.
There are several advantages of organic reach over sponsored ads. Organic reach is long-lasting and needs deeper strategy. Are you ready to starting 10X-ing your social reach? Let’s talk.
How To Calculate Social Media Reach
Do you ever wonder what happens to your content after you publish it—how many people saw it in their feeds, read it, and followed links to find out more? The only way to determine when your social media marketing strategy needs to be adjusted is to monitor performance over time.
According to a study, many brands prioritize metrics like engagement, impressions, followers, and leads when evaluating the success of their social marketing campaigns. Learning how to calculate social reach is essential as it helps businesses drive leads through the social funnel into the sales funnel, turning them into paying customers today.
At MarketBeam, we have built a custom reach calculator for marketers to calculate potential organic social reach. This employee advocacy solution allows employees to participate in the social branding of their employer so that social reach and engagement reach their maximum heights! Are you willing to 10X your online visibility right away? Let’s Begin.
