Social Media Guide for Wattpad

Engagement

It’s not us getting married, silly! Da puppy is already married. 

Rather, engagement when it comes to social media is all about measurable interactions with your messages.

Say What?

Before the Internet, before social media, you might speak your message, or mail it, or fax it. If you were fortunate, you might be able to get your message printed in the newspaper (or a magazine or other publication), or read or shown on television or the radio. Those were your sole real options for getting a message out there. How would you know how many people got the message? You could count the number of people in the room as you spoke it, or the number you mailed or faxed it to. You could get circulation figures for the publication. You could get Nielsen ratings for the TV or radio. And that would be about it. Unless you took a survey or asked questions and got answers to them, you would have no information on how many people were actually reading or listening. 

Fast forward to today. Here on Wattpad, we have metrics for read counts, comment counts, and vote counts. We get a notification for every library add (although once a book is added to enough libraries, you don’t see all of the avatars on the screen. But you could conceivably save the library add email notifications). We also know how many people are following us. All of these are irrefutable numbers that cannot be argued with, not really. Then there are reviews. They are considerably more subjective. We can get a number of comments, but we don’t really know the quality of the comments until we read them. 

But let’s talk about Facebook instead.

Facebook Engagement

I’d like to discuss Facebook because it is well-known to all and the metrics are available in all sorts of places. Facebook is being studied all the time, it seems. 

First, some numbers. 

According to Pew Research, Facebook is used every single day by nearly 2/3 of its American adult user base. The average number of friends for American users is 338! 61% of all American users have over 100 friends. Half have over 200 friends – and 15% have over 500 (I’m one of them). 

Statistic Brain says that the average amount of time people spend on Facebook is 18 minutes - http://www.statisticbrain.com/facebook-statistics/ . Personally, I think that’s incredibly low, but that probably takes into account quick checks on smart phones. It also doesn’t accumulate multiple daily visits.

Individual Engagement

Now let’s perform some calculations with a few easy numbers. You’ve got 200 friends. Let’s say you spend a total of 30 minutes on Facebook daily. Not a farfetched scenario at all. What happens if 2/3 of your friends (or, about 135 people) share an average of 3 pieces of content daily, or they do something or other that triggers a message on Facebook, whether it’s a like or a share or a comment, or a report from a game they may be playing, or a notification that they’ve friended someone. That’s a total of 405 daily activity notifications. 

You’ve got 30 minutes to process those 405 notifications. Or, on average, a little less than 4 ½ seconds apiece. Now, a lot of that activity is simple likes, and Facebook aggregates those, anyway. Even if that cuts that 405 down to a more manageable 120, you still only have 15 seconds per activity notification. And you haven’t even done anything but passively consume others’ activities. 

We all know that you do more than that on Facebook. This doesn’t even get into using chat, or uploading photos or sharing a new status update. Plus you’re probably the member of a group or two or twenty and you might be playing some games and that means even more messages are flying at you. 

What are your options?

1.   Stay on Facebook longer. But you’ll never keep up with it all. That average of 3 activity notifications is laughably small. The figure is likely to be significantly higher than that, by probably a hundredfold and maybe even a thousand fold, for a lot of your friends. You’ll never have enough hours in a day.

2.   Unfriend people and cut the clutter. It’s a solution, but it’s not a great one. Unfriending is pretty rare, albeit not wholly absent from most users’ online lives.

3.       Read less. This is really the only option that is viable. 

When you read less, that 120 aggregated activity notifications might fall to a more manageable 12. With 150 seconds (or, 2.5 minutes) apiece to consume this information, you even have time for some brief comments. Your engagement rate is somewhere between about 3 – 10% (3% when you take into account all 405 notifications, or 10% when you’re only comparing your 12 read notifications to our 120 aggregates). 

This figure is pretty damned typical. 

Group and Page Engagement

For a Facebook page, once it’s liked by 30 or more people (you can like your own page), the site shows metrics, and that includes engagement. Consider your membership. 

If you have 30 members and 5 of them engage with a piece of content you’ve shared, you’ve got a 5/30 engagement rate, or nearly 17%. If you have 100 members and those same 5 people engage with your content, your engagement rate has dropped to 5%. If you have 1000 members, in order to stay at a 5% engagement rate, you need 45 more people to engage.

What to do?

A few ideas –

1.    Once you’ve made it to the magic number of 30 likes, it’s time to try to get people to like your page who are more likely to actually read what you have to say, and will share it. This means understanding your buyer personae (remember that term?) and pitching your page directly to them. E. g. do you write science fiction? Then ask your friends who are members of Star Wars or Doctor Who groups to like your page.

2.   Also try to approach the connectors within your network. A connector is someone who seems to know everyone, and seems to be free with their likes and shares. Ask them to like your page, and ask them to help you out a little. This is voluntary and you can’t push it, but if your pal has 2000 active friends and they also like to share, then one share from her could really help you take off. It pays to nurture relationships with connectors.

3.    Create and share better content. This is mentioned in the video, too. One way to stimulate more engagement is with images. Remember those 405 activity notifications? That’s  usually 3 – 5 sentences about … something (sometimes a sentence in this instance is the name of a game or a website or Facebook asking if you want to tag someone in an image or whatever). At 4 sentences apiece, those 405 activity notifications come to a whopping 1,620 lines. That’s a lot for you to read in your 30 minutes on Facebook. Images are eye-catching within that big sea of text. Use them! 

And, finally, don’t panic. Facebook engagement rate is constantly plummeting, as people accept more friendship requests, join more groups, and play more games. We are simply bombarded with so much information that we can’t possibly process it all. As a result, we miss tons of online messages. 

Don’t fret – and never feel that you’re flooding anyone’s inbox, at least not on Facebook. It’s virtually impossible now. Over 80 (and more like over 85) percent of all of your fans will never see any given piece of content.  

George Takei, Wil Wheaton, Ashton Kutcher, and all of the other titans of social media with millions of likes have the exact same problem. 

The link is to the aforementioned Pew Research report about Facebook; it’s dated to February of 2014 and therefore is considered to be current. The image is self-explanatory. The YouTube video is a pretty good short tutorial about how to increase Facebook engagement.  

Did this chapter help you? Did it hold your interest? Do you want to see more? Then please vote! You know the puppy wants you to. ;) Do you have questions? Did I cover what you needed to read? Let me know in the comments section!