Reach a wider audience with social media
Businesses that go on social media to get exposure need to understand that it’s not just to get people’s attention that they can be successful. One factor that is often overlooked is the reach of your posts. Reach is the term social media experts use to refer to the reach of the area in terms of physical distance and also how far it has covered in the digital world from where it was first posted. The reach is difficult to measure, but the creators of social networking sites have created means and ways for laymen to understand the meaning and terminology.
A product or product idea can spread in a linear pattern, such as when someone says something to another person and then that person tells another person. Most phone or text based information is sent in a relatively linear fashion. Social networking sites, however, spread information in an exponential pattern. When a person posts something, and let’s say they have about a hundred friends, if more than fifty of those friends see or interact with the post in some way, it will appear in the news feeds of fifty of those individuals. Multiply that another fifty times for people who are exposed to the post in the first fifty, and go on and on until the momentum wears off. Dispel is a relatively expressive term because the reach effect of social media posts is similar to that of a single drop ripple.
Algorithms and programs have been created to record the breadth of exposure and reach of certain posts to make it easier for page and profile owners to judge how their posts are doing on these terms. On Facebook, Page owners can see a graph showing the number of people their site has been exposed to over a period of time, and they also have the same option for individual posts. On Twitter, trending hashtags are listed by relevance and reach, which is also a good way to gauge whether your marketing strategy has worked. Facebook’s reach measures don’t just focus on the number of profiles that engaged with the post itself, such as liking, commenting, or reposting it. It also measures approximately how many people have seen the post in their feed.
Although people may not interact with a certain post, that doesn’t mean they won’t be affected even unconsciously by the topic just by seeing it. For example, when popular posts on a certain topic are constantly published, even those who hate it are emotionally affected by it. Because as they say, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
As a Twitter user, do you join conversations that are trending and have a wide reach?
