Facebook Reactions: What They Can Tell You About Your Social Media Marketing
Back in February of this year, Facebook introduced a more differentiated way to interact with individual posts. As a result, there’s now of choice of 6 Facebook Reactions and accompanying emojis: Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry.
For the 1.7 billion Facebook users globally, the experience is much improved. The new reactions can deliver a much wider choice and more accurate range of responses than the standard ‘like’. Think about someone posting a long rant about a traffic incident, or announcing a diagnosis of cancer. Would you ‘like’ it? Now you have the choice of ‘angry’ or ‘sad’ too.
And what about a post you really, really like – such as a birth announcement (‘love’), pictures from an exotic holiday location (‘wow’) or the best joke you’ve heard all month (‘haha’)? It’s clear that Facebook users can now respond more expressively to all kinds of posts.
Facebook for business
But how do the greater range of reactions impact the use of Facebook for business? Well, put simply, if you use Facebook as a social media tool for business, these new reactions can provide you with a wealth of valuable marketing information you didn’t previously have. At a glance, you’re now able to differentiate between what your potential and actual customers ‘like’ and what they really ‘love.’ And that enables you to tailor your products or services more accurately to demand.
What’s more, your customers’ ability to express a negative emotion (‘sad’, ‘angry’) can be used as feedback to fine-tune your posts and improve your social media engagement. And whereas previously, the only way for a customer to react negatively would have been to leave a comment, there’s a quicker way to express displeasure now. So you may also feel the benefit of fewer negative comments being left.
Analysing reactions and responses
You don’t have to be an IT expert or have specialist tools at your disposal to be able to analyse the emotional responses to your Facebook content; it can simply be done via Facebook’s Page Insights. For each individual post, take a look at how many reactions, clicks, shares and comments were received. This will give you an overview of how a particular post is viewed, interpreted and responded to by those who viewed it. Use the information gleaned to inform your customer communications, tweak your content marketing or improve your product strategy.
You can also analyse the same data over a longer period of time, say a week or a month,. And, look at groups of posts. In this way, you can get a better idea of what type of posts are successful and unsuccessful, allowing you to tailor your content (as well as your products and services) to your audience.
Using the new information
Using Facebook for your business is all about creating more immediate engagement with your clientele. It should go without saying that any tool that provides you with differentiated data relating to your potential and actual customers’ preferences for your brand, product or service is of huge commercial value.
Take ‘like’ for instance. Now that there are 5 other emotions to choose from, could ‘like’ rather than ‘love’ mean that your content is a little bit bland? ‘Wow’ is a great reaction. But it’s probably unrealistic to expect it to crop up too frequently. Laughter is very shareable but do be careful because ‘Haha’ can be a double-edged sword. Are they laughing with you or at you? Finally, ‘Sad’ and ‘Angry’ reactions should never come as a surprise.
As a brand, you can take advantage of your audience’s choice of responses to particular types of content – articles, images, updates and more. The information will not only help you to improve your specific Facebook content to make it more appealing to your followers, but this should form part of a much wider marketing strategy to define your brand.
Article provided by Mike James, an independent content writer working together with Best VPN.
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