Making sense of social media engagement data frustrates Amanda. Here’s what she’s doing to fix that.
Understanding social media algorithms can be quite tedious but once you get a handle on how they measure engagement your content and business will flourish.
It’s not uncommon for social media networks to frustrate young entrepreneurs, influencers, and business owners with their ever-changing algorithms. The way they set up their systems to count engagement relevancy definitely takes time to master however it is achievable.
What is a social media algorithm? Algorithms in social media platforms can be defined as technical means of sorting posts based on relevancy instead of publishing time, in order to prioritize which content a user sees first according to the likelihood that they will actually engage with such content.
In this week’s #FollowAttorneyAmanda, Amanda talks about her frustration with understanding social media engagement and the algorithms that surround them.
Video Transcript
Amanda Shaffer: Hi, I am Attorney Amanda Shaffer. Today. I want to talk about the validity of the statistics you see on social media for your engagement and views and all that because I’ve been a little frustrated lately for a few reasons. Number one, I don’t think they’re accurate and I say that because if you saw my other video where I talked about the timing of posts, I posted a game show live last week during the presidential debate, which killed my viewers, of course, or at least I assume they kill my viewers. But what I knew is that my husband and his friends were all watching. There were five of them or at least six of them watching. I told them, just put it on, even if you’re not listening, put it on the whole time. When you looked at the number of viewers that were showing live, it was never more than six or seven.
I know my mom was watching, I know my dad was watching and I know other people were watching, so, hey, I don’t understand why I’m not seeing all my viewers. I don’t really know how to resolve that. This is something I’ve suspected for a while, but I don’t know how to confirm those numbers. I don’t know if there’s any regulation or control over that, which is I think a problem. The other issue is when you post an event like that. So I posted that event in advance to try to get people to tune in and I advertise it a little bit. Then what ends up happening is you create the event, so that creates a post. If you share it, that’s another post. If you put anything into discussion and share it, that’s another post.
When I go to Stream Yard, which is my streaming platform to stream directly to YouTube and Facebook and different places in Facebook at the same time, when I create it there, it creates another one. Then ultimately what I end up having is multiple places where people are viewing the post, liking the post commenting on the post, even when we go live, like if you look where – I might see all the comments aggregated in one place, but they’re all split up. So if you go to our Facebook page, for example, and you scroll down, you’re going to see the same thing over and over and as much as I want to delete them, then I’m possibly deleting comments or likes and you want to keep those. So I’m not really sure how to handle that right now. Like I said, two big issues. One is aggregating all of the engagement into one when it’s the same post or it’s the same event. I don’t want to lose that because people can see that.
The other issue is how do I know that these statistics are correct? So if I don’t think I can trust the statistics, even though I don’t know what half of them mean, what’s the point in learning what they mean? And I know not the best way to think about it, but I have limited time and it’s frustrating. So I am going to have to talk to some people about this to try to figure it out. We’ll see, but it makes you doubt really all the numbers that you see, how do you ever know they’re correct? And if you’re going to really rely on them and especially put a budget towards those numbers and start spending some real money, you want to make sure, obviously that they’re accurate as possible, or there’s some type of assurance about their accuracy.
So, I’ll circle back to this in another – a future episode, when I hopefully have some answers or some clarification, but it’s just something to keep in mind whenever you’re doing it. There are no controls over these things, so how are we monitoring it? How are we ensuring accuracy? And because it’s a lot of money I end up spending on these ads and I don’t want to waste them. If I think I should be posting something to X audience and X audience doesn’t actually care, then that that’s going to be a problem with my bottom line So just another thing to keep in mind. That is all today for #FollowAttorneyAmanda
Join me next time. I’ll be talking about something else. Have a great day. Okay.
