Understanding Facebook Engagement vs Reach

If you plan on using Facebook to drive traffic to your website (you ARE doing this, right?), you need to understand the relationship between Engagement and Reach because if you don’t, you may be one of the marketers whining on the forums about your piddling 2% reach and complaining about needing to used boosted posts to reach your audience. Don’t be that guy (or girl).

Post Engagement

Engagement is a pretty broad term. The engagement metric encompasses any interaction a person has with your posts. Likes, shares, clicks, and comments are all common forms of engagement – and they are all important to a successful Facebook presence. The more post engagement your Facebook content generates, the better – because it fosters a community and relationship with your fans. Your goal should be to drive as much engagement as possible.

Facebook Reach

Reach is defined as the number of fans who see a given post on your Facebook page and it is measured as a percentage. For example, a post that is seen by 100 of your 1000 fans is considered to have a reach of 10% (1000 divided by 100). While some Facebook pages see a typical reach of 10%-20%, other experience a much, much higher reach. Some see much, much lower reach (less than 4%).

Although Facebook has made changes to its algorithm to cut down on reach in general, many Facebook pages continue to thrive with outstanding reach. Why is that?

The Relationship

Facebook wants to ensure that users are sharing useful and wanted content and they are willing to reward those who do so. That reward is improved Reach. As such, the relationship between Engagement and Reach is pretty straightforward – as Engagement improves, so does Reach. It’s really that simple.

Because of the direct relationship between these two metrics, it is critical that the Facebook page owner continues to provide quality content that is interesting to his fan base. Otherwise, reach will plummet and traffic will dry up.

Don’t Be Fake!

Now that you understand the relationship between engagement and reach, you should understand why fake likes are so detrimental to a Facebook page. In case you still don’t get it, let me explain.

Let’s assume you go out and purchase 1000 fake likes from some Fiverr seller for your new fan page. Since these likes are all fake, very few of the “fans” are going to interact with your fan page content at all, producing a terrible engagement metric for your page. If you are lucky, you may get a handful of interactions (post likes, shares, etc) – let’s assume you get five.

Why would Facebook reward you with higher reach when your content clearly is unimportant to your “fans”?

Now, on the flip side, let’s assume, instead, that you’ve run a solid Facebook “Like” campaign and built up an following of 1000 REAL fans. Since these fans are genuinely interested in your content, they are far more likely to interact with the content. Instead of receiving 5 engagements, you may see 10x or 20x that amount.

As a result, Facebook will reward you with a much better reach when you post to your fan page.

So… Before you start trying to drive traffic with Facebook, make sure you have a plan to build a REAL fan base and to provide quality content to that fan base.

HyperLocal is Here – Time to Hop Aboard

Have you read some of the headlines concerning Hyperlocal lately? Do a search for “hyperlocal advertising” and you’ll find things like How Hyperlocal Advertising Changes Everything and Small Businesses Target Hyper-Local Mobile Ads, and much, much more. Even Facebook is getting into hyperlocal.

Maybe it’s time for YOU to get into the hyperlocal game as well.

What is Hyperlocal?

Wikipedia’s definition of hyperlocal is probably the most accurate:

“A working definition of hyperlocal was published in a 2012 Nesta report, describing it as online news or content services pertaining to a town, village, single postcode, or other small, geographically defined community."

Hyperlocal is basically niche marketing on steroids and what surprises me the most is that most people are largely ignoring it, meaning there are still HUGE opportunities in the hyperlocal marketing space. I mean, hyperlocal knocks down (quite easily, I might add) the major hurdle for most new marketers – traffic. A halfway-decent hyperlocal website will capture significant traffic by accident. Imagine what a well-designed, well-run hyperlocal will do?

How Does Hyperlocal Marketing Work?

It’s actually pretty simple – and much like niche marketing. Instead of targeting a specific niche, the webmaster targets a specific community or area. By maintaining such a narrow focus, the webmaster can be sure that his or her content is laser-focused on the audience being targeted. As a result, the webmaster is often rewarded with massive amounts of traffic while needing to exert very little effort.

Many successful hyperlocals follow the same recipe for success. They build a nicely designed (and branded) website along with a matching Facebook page, which is often used as a “feeder” to the website. Since a properly executed Facebook “like” campaign can generate as many as 1000 real fans for less than $100, it becomes rather easy to build a significant fan base of several thousand interested people almost overnight for just a few hundred dollars.

Since a hyperlocal website/brand is laser-targeted, fan engagement is often “off the charts” and often results in amazing reach. In turn, the hyperlocal website receives TONS of laser-targeted traffic, day in and day out – simply on the strength of the website content shared on the hyperlocal’s Facebook page.

Hyperlocal on Steroids

Hyperlocal brands that successfully match their hyperlocal audience with a hyperlocal niche often see explosive growth. A good example is BerksSoccerNews.com. A local youth soccer site in Pennsylvania, Berks Soccer News often sees upwards of 1000-2000 visitors per day during the fall high school soccer season. It’s a great example of how a smart webmaster can generate massive traffic by coupling a hyperlocal niche with a hyperlocal audience.

There is one caveat to this hyperlocal thing…

The hyperlocal model lives and dies on the quality of the content (often news-related) provided. Since one of the primary sources of traffic to a hyperlocal site is “return visitors”, poor quality content simply won’t cut it. On the flip side, however, a hyperlocal site with quality content can often generate thousands of visits per day, despite the relatively small target audience.

But How Does a Hyperlocal Make Money?

A hyperlocal website is really no different than any other website. As such, hyperlocals monetize in various ways, including affiliate marketing, ad sales, AdSense, direct product sales, service delivery, etc. There is no shortage of ways to monetize laser-targeted traffic.

What SMART hyperlocals do is avoid “monetizing” for the first few weeks or months as they build the site and the community. Only after a relationship has been established does the smart webmaster begin monetizing the site and the brand. Even then – he avoids the “hard sell”, instead, option for the “soft sell”. It’s a strategy that works for thousands of hyperlocals around the world.

Low Bar to Entry

With such low startup costs, a hyperlocal can be up and running inside of a week, complete with an audience and readership for less than two hundred bucks. Few businesses can be started for such a small investment.

If you are looking for an easy to run online business with low start-up costs, consider a hyperlocal.

This is Why You are Failing as an Amazon Affiliate

There are lots of reasons one can fail as an Amazon (or CJ, Linkshare, ShareASale, etc) affiliate. However, some reasons are more obvious than others.

Listed below are some of the more major reasons I’ve seen for folks failing at affiliate marketing (especially Amazon).

You are targeting products that you can’t possibly rank for…

So you want to earn monster commissions in the HDTV niche eh? Well, so does everyone else. If you rely on organic search for traffic, stop promoting "Best Sellers" and popular items. Everyone and their grandmom is doing this. Unless you can rank above the fold on page one in Google, your product reviews just aren’t going to be seen. Instead, go after the less-competitive products in the same niche.

You are spending more time on backlinks and less time creating content…

If you need to spend 5 hours per day building backlinks just to rank your product reviews, you are really making life difficult for yourself. There is so much low-hanging fruit to chase that I never understood why people chase generic, high-traffic / high-competition terms that require such effort to rank for. Target lower-competition stuff and spend more time writing content for your site and less time trying to rank. You will have far fewer grey hairs and results will be realized more quickly.

You are not targeting "buying" phrases…

Sure, the term "HDTVs" will get you a TON of traffic (if you can even rank for it). However, how many people who are searching for that term are going to actually buy anything anytime soon? I’ll answer for you – not many. Stop targeting "traffic" and start targeting "buying" traffic. Think about what terms you would search for when researching something you were ready to purchase. Those are the terms you should be targeting.

Your content is not compelling…

If I am searching for information about a product I am ready to buy and I land on your site and I’m immediately greeted with a wall of text, I’m clicking my "back" button. For Pete’s sake, break it up! Add some images! Add some paragraphs! A wall of 800 words just isn’t appealing to me. By the same token, please don’t tell me 4-slice toasters are great or that I can toast more slices of bread faster. Stop with the mundane details. Give me something useful.

Oh, and PLEASE don’t just repeat what Amazon is saying. Chances are VERY GOOD that I’ve ALREADY been to the product page on Amazon. I already know what they are saying about it. At least give me YOUR opinion on what Amazon/others are saying about the product. Simply parroting what Amazon already said is not helpful to me.

You are promoting things that people simply do not buy online…

I realize that "anything" can be bought online. That said, some things just aren’t as conducive to online shopping as other things. Some things are simply too expensive for many to trust buying online. Some stuff requires the buyer to try it on. Some stuff is just cheaper at a brick and mortar. Think about what you are trying to promote and ask yourself if people really buy it online.

You are promoting things that you know nothing about…

I just thought of this one. Please folks, know something about what you are promoting. If you know nothing about HDTVs, either learn about them first or simply do not promote them. It becomes painfully clear in your wording when you have no idea what you are talking about. Your visitors can tell.

I’m sure there are others and I’ll add them as I think of them. That said, address the few mentioned above and you will give yourself a much better chance of success.