More Likers, followers, viewers, subscribers. So often the next bridge to cross to achieve success hinges on growing the number of consumers who have subscribed to receive a brand’s content. But this focus on a singular goal does two things. First, it means marketers will never view their efforts as successful because they’ll always want more. Second, and most importantly, it diverts our attention away from social media’s true value, engagement with consumers, not reaching mass numbers.

People Talking About

Facebook recently launched the People Talking About metric to Facebook Insights to allow Page admins to view the interactions taking place on a Page, such as Likes, Mentions, Shares, photo-tags and so on from one metric. Basically, it’s a good metric to look at if you want to see how well your brand is engaging with its Page Likers.

People Talking About was coupled with the launch of a Virality metric that takes the numbers of People Talking About divided by reach, which shows the level of engagement each piece of content is getting, allowing Page admins to see what content (e.g., questions, photos, videos, etc.) is driving interaction.

Engagement Makes Your Content Work

Marketers can only do so much with the content they produce. If no one is interacting with it, it’s not going to do anything for the brand. Consumer interaction with content powers it to be viewed by more people as it’s more likely to show up in more News Feeds, meaning Likers won’t be the only ones seeing a brand’s content. Their friends will to.

More With Less

When people interact with your content, your content shows up in more places than your own social media platform and to more people than those who follow/”Like”/subscribe to you. This means you can potentially reach more people by encouraging interaction than you ever could by just focusing on increasing the number of people who follow you.

This is true on a number of platforms:

Facebook - interaction with your Page increases the likelihood content will display in News Feeds across Facebook
Twitter - Retweets and @replies allow your content to display in the Timelines of more than just your followers. When they interact, their followers are exposed to you, too.
Videos, Photos, Blog Posts - Encouraging interaction gives users more reasons to share with their social graphs.

Growth in followers is important, but quality is key. It’s imperative to grow with the right people who will want to view your content, interact with it and share it with others. It will allow your brand to do a lot more with not as many followers. After all, that’s what makes social media marketing so powerful--the ability to deliver a message to one and watch it reach many.