Part 2: Why You Should Stop Sweating Over Facebook Engagement

In case you missed it, Part 1 is here. In it, I shared my thoughts about why we shouldn’t obsess over social engagement like we do .

In a nutshell, more people are enjoying your posts than what Facebook tells you.

And I’m writing today to share a discovery I recently made — one that proves your social influence is greater than you think.

Backstory:

A few days ago I was searching how Lighter Side’s content stacks up with other brands. (I was particularly interested in share counts).

To do this, I used a tool called Buzzsumo, which is a search tool we pay monthly for. It tracks your social media content (specifically articles) and tells you how many people are sharing it.

Naturally, I was searching for the term “real estate”. See the results below.

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Here’s the interesting part…

Per Buzzsumo, our average share count for articles is 17,969.

When I first saw that, I was blown away.

Why? Because the average number of shares I get per article is around 500. I know this because I monitor each post and pay attention to how many shares Facebook tells me I’m getting. It’s displayed right under every post.

Some Lighter Side articles get around 200 or less.

Some get 1,000+, just depends.

But I’d say our average hovers around 500.

Obviously 500 shares per article is much different than 17,969.

So why the discrepancy?

People are sharing your content without using Facebook’s share button.

(And that’s good news because if they’re a-sharin’, they’re a-readin’.)

See, with the articles you post, the vast majority of readers are copying the URL and reposting it.

This bypasses Facebook’s share tracking, which can skew your perception of how many people you think are digging your stuff.

This is true with images too. Many people will download them and re-upload them without technically ‘sharing’ them.

I’m perfectly okay that people do this, but the point is that when they do, their actions aren’t being recorded by Facebook. Therefore, you can’t physically see that it was shared.

The Takeaway

Keep doing what you’re doing — sharing good content — and don’t get discouraged if your engagement numbers are lower than you’d like. You’re reaching way more people than you realize.