Social reach is defined many ways, as you will find across the internet. My preferred definition of social reach is defined as the total number of people you are able to reach across all of your various social media networks. I also refer to that as the total social reach since you are encompassing all social media networks under one reach number. Subsequently, this means that there are also individual social reach numbers such as Twitter reach, Facebook Reach, LinkedIn Reach, etc.
One of the key things to consider when you are developing your social media strategy is the number of people you are able to potentially reach over social media platforms and how well you can continually grow that reach. How good your content is and how well your social strategies are performing can be reflected by your social reach and its growth percentages. The website traffic and leads that you generate from social media directly correlates to social reach.
It’s pretty simple to assume that the more people you are able to reach with your content, the more traffic you are going to receive and the more leads you are going to generate. If you are not investing in increasing your social reach, you will also experience great conflict when trying to grow your website traffic and lead generation from social media.
Take these statistics into consideration. In regards to Twitter reach, companies with 51 to 100 followers generate 106% more website traffic than those companies that only have 25 or fewer followers. After crossing 1,000 Twitter followers, B2C companies experience a larger traffic increase than B2B companies. Now in terms of Facebook reach, the average company saw 185% increase in traffic after crossing 1,000 Facebook likes. Companies with more than 50 employees saw the biggest gains in website traffic from growing their Facebook reach. On a more competitive note, the impact of social reach between networks can be quite different. Twitter has always been known as the best generator of leads. “Twitter is the strongest social media channel for generating leads. It even outperforms Facebook and LinkedIn 9-to-1 with 82% of social media leads coming from Twitter (according to business.com).
These statistics represent exactly how great of an impact growing your social reach has on increasing your website traffic and lead generation through social media. These social reach numbers are not massive yet the impact that they have, along with how great your content is, is huge. As shown above, just by increasing your Twitter following by 25 doubles your website traffic from social media. That is only with this small number of followers. Website traffic is impacted by the growth rate of social reach at an exponential rate after hitting certain benchmarks like 51 Twitter followers or 1,000 Facebook likes. Until that point, website traffic is still growing but it resembles more of a stable, or flat, growth rate.
It’s not just a matter of how many people you are able to reach over social media but more importantly, it’s who you are reaching out to specifically. What I mean by this is if you target the right people, people who are already interested in what your company has to offer, then you are reaching out to marketing qualified leads instead of just leads. For example, if your company offers IT consulting services then it would make sense to extend your social reach to Chief Information Officers. These people are prequalified leads because they could already be looking for those types of offers. It’s better to have 10 marketing qualified leads than 100 leads. It’s more likely that all of the marketing qualified leads will eventually become customers where hardly any of those 100 regular leads will become customers.
When it comes to the impact that social reach has on website traffic and lead generation, the impact is big. Plus, that impact is only becoming greater as social media marketing reaches necessity in today’s business world.
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