Social Content and Engagement

Let’s figure out what content is getting the best engagement on social media.

One of the easiest ways to find engagement is to go directly to the various sites, to Facebook, to Twitter, to Google+, and they do give you some stats, like with Facebook.

Facebook, there was a time when a simple post on Facebook, was actually getting the largest reach. However, those posts were not the ones getting the most engagement. It was actually photos that get the most engagement.

If you see on our page, you'll notice that we often post photos because those are getting us the most engagement, and engagement for us is something that we're particularly measuring. We're looking at an engagement, which means someone has liked, shared, or re-shared one of our posts. Twitters, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn all have these types of engagement metrics.

You can use Facebook Insights. You can also take a look at a tool called Unified. What they do is they take a bit of a deeper dive into things. I want to show you, in May 2013, we started using this tool. Through testing we found that it showed that photos were getting a ton more engagement, so we changed it up a bit. You can see that we started posting a lot more photos than we did plain links, and we also started adding just text. We were asking questions and driving more engagement. You can see that the likes and the engagements on those particular things went way up high.

Moz continued to test. We continued to try new things. We're still posting more photos. Facebook has actually made changes to their algorithm; it's not so much as just what we're doing. It's what the particular sites are doing as well. Facebook is changing the algorithm because they want to ensure that spam isn't getting on your page, and also they want to ensure that you're paying to make sure that your information gets out there.

When we look at the actual engagement numbers, they're much lower. There are a lower number of people. The people who are engaging are engaging very highly.

What we can do is take a look at what we might test next is we're going to take photos and links and we're going to do some testing on what we can kick into overdrive. If links are doing great right now, we're going to try that a bit more.

What about what gets re-tweeted? Whatever you use – any tool that you have is actually going to show you what is getting the most re-tweets. Now Social Engage tells me that that's the kind of content that people are really liking. So we might go to our content team and say, "Where are these other guides? Or let's go back and tweet more about the SEO beginners guide or any various things that we have that are similar."

The next thing you want to look at is reach, and you can find the reach in a number of ways, whether you use Buffer or Sprout Social. Finding what has the most reach is another good indicator of what actually is getting engaged or what is engaging people and getting people excited about it.

You can also look at Google+. I know people often forget about Google+ because they say nobody's there and that sort of thing, but there really are people there. Actually, the people who are there are quite engaged. Simply Measured is a tool to use that you can get that data. They also have some free tools that are really great, and I'd highly recommend using that as sort of a starting point to find out what's getting engagement on Google+. You have to try to understand between Facebook, Twitter and Google+ what the verbiage is that they're using -- but an article is just a regular link, and right now that's what's getting the most engagement for us.

So those are the ways. I would jump right in and measure how you're getting engagement and what is working best, and that's when the next thing you do is you test it out. You try it out, you measure it, and see what happens next. Good luck.