Social media has evolved significantly. What was once an experimental marketing tool for disruptive brands has now matured into a critical component of any business strategy. It's recognized by leaders for its immense value and is no longer a novelty, but a necessity.
Social media teams today do much more than create posts—they're at the heart of customer engagement, collecting insights that shape business decisions. Imagine your social media as the pulse of your brand, constantly interacting with and learning from your audience.
This article explores how to harness social media's full potential to drive engagement and boost conversions for your business.
Reach, Engagement and Conversion Explained
Reach, engagement, and conversions are key metrics for tracking and measuring your social media strategy. Together, they provide a comprehensive view of how content performs and how it enhances audience interaction and business goals. According to HubSpot, the top goal for 23% of marketers in 2024 is increasing revenue and sales. 18% noted that increasing engagement was their priority.
Reach
Reach isn’t the same as impressions. Social reach represents the number of unique individuals who see your post, while impressions count the total number of times the post is viewed. This could include multiple views by the same person.
Reach helps you understand your audience size and how far your content spreads. A higher reach indicates that more people are seeing your posts, which is the first step in driving engagement and conversion.
For instance, if your post reaches 500 people out of 5,000 followers, your ARR would be 10%. A reasonable reach rate depends on the platform and the industry. The average Instagram reach rate for brands with large followings is 12% for posts and 2% for stories.
Engagement
Engagement could be likes, comments, or shares. It indicates how much your audience interacts with your content. High engagement suggests that your content captures attention and fosters interaction, while low engagement might tell you the content isn't appealing to your intended audience.
Engagement drives loyalty. 31% of B2B professionals say social media enables them to build deeper relationships with their clients through regular interactions.
Engagement is best measured over time, so you evaluate trends instead of individual posts. For example, if you've had 500 likes, shares, and comments in a month and your reach is 5,000 people, your engagement rate is 10%. Engagement rates vary by platform, but most experts agree that a good engagement rate for most social media platforms is between 1 and 5%.
Conversion
Conversion, on the other hand, goes beyond interaction to measure how engagements translate into tangible outcomes, like sales or lead generation. The more substantial the engagement, the higher the likelihood that your audience will take action. Thus, conversion is a powerful indicator of ROI.
For example, 75% of B2B buyers consult social media before purchasing.
For example, if you've had 500 purchases and 5,000 people interacted (clicked a link, liked, shared, commented, etc.) with your social media post or ad, your conversion rate is 10%.
Conversion rates also vary across channels and sectors. However, anywhere between 2 to 5% is considered successful.
Knowing the differences between organic and paid social media is vital to optimizing reach, engagement, and conversion. It empowers you to make informed decisions and optimize your reach, engagement, and conversion strategies.
Paid vs. Organic Social Media Strategy
A balanced approach between paid and organic social media strategies results in maximum engagement and conversion.
Organic Social Media
Organic social media is content shared on social media platforms without any paid promotion. It relies on follower engagement and the natural growth of your brand's social media presence to reach and connect with your target audience. Organic is great for building brand awareness and creating a digital profile that reflects your brand identity. It helps you connect with your audience in a very authentic way.
Paid Social Media
Paid social media is the use of advertising on social media platforms to promote content, products, or services. You pay to have your content displayed to a targeted audience. This can include sponsored posts, display ads, video ads, and more, all designed to reach a broader or more specific audience than what might be achieved through organic reach alone.
Paid social media is more about driving conversions. It can push people through your marketing funnel with repeated messaging that turns awareness into action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a demo. Paid social media amplifies your content and allows more people to engage with your brand.
A Note About Measuring Results
Here's an important caveat to measuring results. Organic social media has limitations in tracking conversions. While metrics like website clicks and link taps can provide some insights, integrating paid media can offer deeper and more comprehensive data on conversion effectiveness, allowing for a more robust understanding of your social media strategy's impact and better conversion rates.
Balancing the Two
A balance of organic and paid creates a well-rounded strategy that delivers results. We suggest using similar content in both formats. When you boost posts or create ads with similar themes, you encourage deeper audience participation and grab more attention. Don't make them exactly the same, algorithms don't always like that. Provide more value in each post or ad. A balanced approach also provides you with valuable insights into how you're reaching and engaging your desired audience.
The best social media strategy is built around reaching the right audience on the right platform. Let’s discuss this critical point next.
Meeting Your Audience Where They Are
One of the most crucial aspects of any social media strategy is meeting your audience where they spend their time. This means developing a targeted approach that ensures your content reaches the right people on the most frequently used platforms.
A Pew Research Center survey of 5,733 U.S. adults in 2023 found that 78% of 18- to 29-year-olds use Instagram, far higher than adults 65 and older (15%). Americans ages 30 to 49 use LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and Facebook at higher rates. In addition, Americans with higher levels of formal education are more likely to use LinkedIn. While women use TikTok, Pinterest, and Instagram at higher rates than men.
Tailor Your Content to Your Audience and Platforms
Keep your target audience in mind when creating social media content. Understanding what issues, problems, challenges, and preferences resonate most with your customers and leads will help you develop relatable content that speaks directly to them. This also includes using tools like hashtags and geotagging to increase visibility and awareness, helping you gain traction in key markets.
Next, let’s discuss the steps to take in building a social media strategy with the goals of engagement and conversion in mind.
Developing a Social Media Strategy
Phase 3’s process for building a social media strategy for clients is very thorough.
Audit
The first step always involves conducting a comprehensive internal audit of your current social media channels. This audit allows us to evaluate what's working and what needs improvement. Our analysis includes reviewing key engagement and conversion metrics such as comments, shares, saves, and link clicks. These insights help us understand how your audience interacts with your content and where there may be gaps in engagement or barriers to conversion.
Optimize Each Channel
It’s important to include a complete description of your brand, relevant leader names, contact information including physical addresses and phone numbers, and digital links in your bio or profile on every channel. You must make it very easy for your audience to reach you. In addition, links are significant for social media. Each post or story should include a relevant link where readers can go for more information and the next steps.
Create the Right Content
If your primary objectives are to boost engagement and conversion rates, our strategy will focus on delivering content that invites interaction.
Video
The content that drives the most engagement on social media these days is short-form videos, especially Reels on Facebook and Instagram. 73% of consumers say they want to watch a short-form video to learn about a product or service. In addition, 67% of marketers say that sharing videos on social media has the most significant ROI of any marketing strategy.
Interactive Elements
Aside from video, you want to engage your audience with eye-catching images and interactive elements such as polls and surveys. Carousel posts and stories on Instagram perform well, especially if they’re visually appealing. For B2B clients, this may include live Q&A sessions or webinars on LinkedIn Live. For B2C clients, interactive content may include influencer channel takeovers on Instagram or product reviews on TikTok.
The 80/20 Rule
We suggest planning a mix of content types, including promotional posts, educational content, user-generated content, and interactive elements like polls or questions, to keep your audience interested and engaged. Use the 80/20 rule, where 80% of your content is informative, and 20% is sales-related.
Use Clear Calls to Action
We always incorporate strong calls to action (CTAs) in content, prompting followers to tag friends or embedding links that lead directly to booking pages or purchasing options. It's important to place links in stories and bios on Instagram and within posts on platforms like Facebook or X. These small steps can help guide your engaged audience toward making a purchase or signing up.
Establish a Content Calendar
We document and schedule our client's social media strategy with a detailed content calendar that outlines the platforms, posting dates, target audiences, content types, captions, and hashtags for each post or ad.
A content calendar serves as a strategic roadmap, ensuring every social media post is planned, consistent, and aligned with goals. Organizing and scheduling content in advance provides the consistency that keeps audiences engaged.
Additionally, the calendar allows you to align your social media efforts with key dates, product launches, or industry events so that all content is timely and relevant. Regularly reviewing and adjusting the content calendar based on performance metrics refines the strategy.
Frequency and Timing
Consistency is vital to the success of any social media strategy. Understanding when your target audience will most likely be active on social media is essential for optimizing post visibility and engagement.
For instance, some clients benefit from posting every day or even more than once a day, while others achieve high engagement by posting just two to three times a week. Maintaining a consistent posting schedule tailored to the habits and preferences of your audience is key.
If you don’t know when or where your audience is spending their time, there are tools that can help you. The Phase 3 team uses a social media analytics platform that calculates the best day/time to post content on different platforms.
The goal of building a social media strategy is to make your user experience as effortless and appealing as possible. When you achieve that, people are more likely to engage with your content and feel motivated to take the next steps you want them to.
An Emerging Social Media Trend
Social media features change almost daily, so our team needs to stay on top of current trends to provide clients with the best recommendations and services possible.
We're really excited about collaboration posts as an emerging trend because they have a powerful impact on both engagement and conversion. Collab posts allow brands and influencers to combine their reach and influence, tapping into each other's audiences. This exposure means your content reaches a broader and often very interested group of people. Partnering with a complementary brand or influencer in a synergistic social media campaign can significantly boost your audience reach and engagement, helping you connect with new potential followers or customers.
Social Media Has Come a Long Way
Social media has grown from being a cool marketing tool into a crucial business strategy, something leaders now recognize for its very real impact. As it evolves, the real challenges are demonstrating its value with solid metrics like engagement and conversion and ensuring it aligns with overall business goals.
To truly harness the power of social media, start by auditing your current efforts, refine your strategy with targeted engagement and conversion-focused content, and strike the right balance between paid and organic approaches.
Ready to transform your social media strategy? If you’re wondering how to optimize your social media marketing strategy for engagement and conversion, we’re here to help. We work with brands to build branded social media campaigns that deliver results. Contact us today for more information.