Forget about like counts; focus on engagement.
I can hear sighs of relief from some (“Finally no more race to hundreds of thousands of likes”) and some disgruntlement (“Ugh, now that I spent all this time, money and effort, you say it doesn’t matter?”).
Engagement as a metric of value.
The like counts still matter on a psychological level, because we as consumers believe the popularity of a given product to be correlated with its quality. We as entrepreneurs also look at the like counts as a metric for reputation of the company and as a metric for effectiveness of social media marketing efforts.
However, the real metric for success of our digital marketing efforts lies in engagement rates. Would you choose to have 100 followers, 50 percent of which visit your site and purchase regularly, or 5000 followers, one percent of which visit your site and purchase regularly?
Engagement is a much better prediction of the quality of your content, which, after some time, builds loyalty in your audience. If you continuously pump out amazing, insightful information people love to read and share, you are in the gold, because they will eventually develop a habit to look out for your next piece.
The second reason to focus on engagement rates is because, eventually, your high-quality content will earn you more followers. Most social networks now have an algorithm in place that decides what posts deserve to be pushed out into more feeds. So, if you’ve built a small but loyal following, your engagement rates will signal networks that more people will find this post…