Week 6: Post Reach vs. Post Engagement

For businesses using Facebook, checking in on page insights allows them to see who and how an audience is engaging with a page.  A couple of features on Facebooks insights shares information that are vital to find out how many people are seeing and interacting with a post.  The two features are post reach and post engagement.  The difference of the two are pretty straight forward.  When a business creates a new ad or post, viewing the post reach for that ad shows the number of people who have seen the ad.  It describes in numbers, how many people it has "reached" and is a good way for a larger amount of people to see the business and make them more known.  However, this reach only goes so far in that there is no more action or response from the people viewing the post.  On the other hand, engagement measures how many people engage with or click on your ad for more information.  It can include a click, comment, like or share, but the important point is that someone not only seen the post, rather they went a step further and took some sort of action.
Knowing the difference is important, because each ad or post can have a different goal in mind.  Getting a high reach can be used to create brand awareness, by exposing larger amounts of people to the message or ad.  It can be a way to just be seen by your followers.  When you want to engage with or build a closer relationship with customers, the engagement is important because is can prompt a customer to take action and engage with the business.  A business can better serve it's customers through Facebook insights by understanding an audience or customer base by determining their interests in each demographic by knowing which posts perform well.  This allows businesses to alter the content for future posts and ads that can be more relevant to what they may be interested in. They can provide more useful content, while also determining what demographics are more interested in and interact with it's products or services.