Facebook Engagement and Reach

An Instagram account for a photographer makes a lot of sense, its photo based, clean, modern, and with the hashtags and explore page it is great for finding new people and new people finding you. I thought.

I had been focusing pretty much solely on my Instagram, honestly I only had the Facebook page so I could get the business Instagram page. Eventually I saw that other photographers were preforming better than me (lest not I compare) yet never were on Instagram,

Hypothesis? Maybe Facebook is a better platform for reaching people and building a brand.

That gave me a huge push to start focusing on my Facebook page, posting more regularly, and not just blasting three months of pictures when I logged in. In hindsight I should have been more professional with my page management to begin with, even if I did not care too much about it.

Jump down to the chart at the bottom if you know or don't care

about the explanation and importance of likes, comments, shares, engagement and reach are.

What I did find very clear is the importance of "engagement" on posts. Engagement is all of your likes, comments, and shares. It plays a major part in how many people your post reaches, Reach is how many different people saw your post, it can include people who scrolled by so fast they didn't even see anything, or people who actually read it, whether or not they liked, commented or shared.

I wanted to say that reach wasn't important. I does not tell you how many people actually enjoy your content, but it does let you know how far your brand is extending into the masses. It is also helpful to take the total number of people who have either glanced or read your post, to the number of people who actually clicked on it, aka engagement.

The importance of engagement

1. Those are the numbers that tell you about how your content is enjoyed

2. It also helps get your post out to more people

Facebook values engagement beyond all else, when some one likes or comments on a post, there is a high chance that it will then pop up on all their friends feed as a "Jan like this post from Fehrtography" or "Jan commented on Fehrtography's post" and then shows my post. If someone shares my post, it will 100% of the time show up on their friends feed. That is why on spam pages (the bane of the earth) they use tactics like "comment your name letter by letter" "like if you know what a watermelon is." There is no dignity in fishing for engagement that is not relevant to your content.

A like lets you know that someone is interested in your content, comments lets you know they are interested and have opinions about it. Shares tell you that some one liked your content enough that not only did they enjoy it, they think their friends would too.

With each engagement, there is a high chance that it will reach more people, and when those people engage, the domino effect starts.

I took the reach and total engagement of posts since may of last year for a business I manage on Facebook. To be clear, they are on two totally different scales, In no way is my average engagement higher than a bad reach. The problem was that the reach had such higher numbers that a normal cut and dry bar chart would make the engagement invisible.

The point is to see the flow of the reach with the flow of the engagement.