Ghost Town: The Truth Behind Your Silent Social Media Feed

Don't stress about low social media engagement—it's a widespread trend reflecting changing user behavior rather than poor content quality. Looking at impressions instead of likes gives you a more accurate picture of your content's reach and effectiveness.

• Most people have become passive scrollers who rarely like, comment, or share content
• The habit of enthusiastic engagement from early social media days has dramatically changed
• Focus on impression analytics rather than engagement metrics
• Create engaging content through behind-the-scenes videos, blooper reels, and time-lapses
• Utilize Stories, which often get more views than regular posts
• Be more engaging with others' content—you reap what you sow

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Marketing Happy Hour
• 1:39 Why Engagement Is Declining
• 5:21 Focus on Impressions, Not Likes
• 6:39 Creating More Engaging Content
• 8:56 Reaping What You Sow

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:28

Welcome to the Marketing Happy Hour podcast. I'm your host, shelby McFarlane, founder of the Marketing Broker. Join us as we dive into marketing tips, business insights and creative strategies to help your brand stand out, whether you're an entrepreneur or a marketing pro. Grab your drink and let's make marketing fun and effective. This is the Marketing Happy Hour podcast. Let's get started. Hey guys, what's up? It's Shelby here with the Marketing Broker.

Speaker 1: 0:56

I'm so excited that you decided to tune in again with the Marketing Happy Hour podcast. This is a platform that I get to share all of my information that I've learned, the skills that I've learned over the last 10 years in digital marketing, and maybe you can apply it to yourself or even your clients, if that's something you do as well. Today, we are going to talk about why you're not getting engagement on social media. This is the number one question that I get from my clients. Actually, I take that back. This is the second question I get from my clients. The first one is why didn't I get five clients off of one post that you did, but that's for another podcast episode. So why are we not getting engagement on social media? We're staying consistent, right? We've got our three posts a week. We've got our engaging supposedly engaging of photos and videos. We're out here trying to create captions. We're using AI, we're using chat, gpt. Our photos are real people, not just clip art. We have educational stuff. We're doing all the things we need to do that we've been told we need to do over the last 10 years and now we've seen our engagement really drop.

Speaker 1: 2:07

If you've seen this and you are worried about it, please do not be worried. I see this amongst all of my clients and all the pages that I manage, even my own page. So think about your clientele. Who are you trying to reach and who are the people that follow you? Are those people normally engaging on social media? I can tell you that my clientele are usually not on social media. So if they're going to hire me for digital marketing, they may go and Google me and look at me on social media, but they're not just going to find me as they're scrolling through their feed because they aren't interested in social media. So let's flip the script. Let's say that you are a plumber or an electrician and you're looking for the everyday person that has a toilet, that has a freaking outlet. Hello, we all have those two things right. So those are everybody that's scrolling on social media. Are your future clients or potential clients in your area? So why are those people not engaging with your stuff?

Speaker 1: 3:05

Let's go back to 10 years ago, whenever social media came around, when fan pages were starting all of that. It was all about posting once a week, or posting once a day or, honestly, if you just posted at all, you were already way ahead of your competition. Back then it was so easy because we were new to social media. We were new to seeing businesses and we were always like, like, like, like, share. We're gonna comment, we're gonna um, show this to our friends, we're gonna tag our uh, our people that we want to send people to, we're gonna tag our favorite businesses. So that's really what we did back in social media to the beginning of social media days. So I want you to think back to what you did 10 years ago on social media.

Speaker 1: 3:51

Now let's think about what you do as a person that's consuming social media content. What are your habits on social media? I'm just going to tell you what my habits are. I scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Never hit the like button. I never hit the share button. I usually never comment, unless it's just something that I am extremely passionate about, or it's somebody that I know, or maybe somebody's birthday, maybe some of my girlfriends that look good. I'm like, hey, queen, how you doing? You know something like that, but I am not one to engage on social media, so I am seeing this as a habit being formed by most people on social media. So when my clients come up with, well, we're not getting engagement, we're not getting shares or likes or comments, and I'm like, well, what are your habits on social media? And they usually say the same thing, like, well, I guess you're right, I don't actually share or comment or like anything on social media as well.

Speaker 1: 4:55

So what analytic do we need to look at? So, since the engagement's down and we're kind of curious of like, do people see our stuff? Do they not see our stuff? What analytic do we need to look at to make sure what we're posting is actually working? Do we need to look at to make sure what we're posting is actually working? So when I am sending over analytics to my clients, I want to make sure that I have the impressions on there.

Speaker 1: 5:20

The impressions analytics on Meta is all about how many people have actually seen your content post. So if you have one post and you see that there's 400 impressions, there's two people that engaged with it and then you, if your views on your page are also increasing, then that means people are seeing your stuff. So let's take our eyes off of the engagement part and then let's put our eyes onto the impressions and how many people are actually seeing your stuff. Now, yes, sometimes one impression or, I'm sorry, two impressions can come from one person, but that means that person has seen your stuff twice and that counts as two touches for your marketing. So I think that's a win win. So when you're looking at your analytics, make sure you look at those impressions versus looking at the engagement. So let's talk about how can we make our stuff more engaging, right? What are different strategies that we can use that maybe people would actually comment, like or share our stuff?

Speaker 1: 6:19

Now let's think if you're an insurance person so an insurance person you're putting out social media posts. People don't really care about you, no offense. So let's try to get creative with your stuff. Let's make some cute reels. Let's do some funny behind the scenes with the ladies and guys that work at your office. Let's do some blooper reels from maybe some of the videos that you have put together for social media. If you are someone okay, like me with my sign shop, I always make sure to do behind the scenes photos, behind the scenes videos, time lapses of installs, befores and afters, because people like to see results in that way. So your company or your content or whatever you do may not be interesting to people. Okay, we're not all out here like selling the coolest product. We're not all out here selling the latest trendy outfit or shirt or accessory, so it may be a little bit harder to post engaging stuff. So let's think outside the box, let's really lean into the reels, let's lean into the videos, because people are swiping through reels or swiping through the videos.

Speaker 1: 7:27

And I also want you to stay on your story. I have a really bad habit of going to Instagram story story, story, story story. I just keep tapping, tapping, tapping, tapping, tapping, never even scroll the actual feed. So anything that I post out there for my business or even my personal stuff, I make sure to put in a story, because that's gonna reach even more people and it's actually easier for them to engage with it. I get a lot of hearts. You'll get a lot of like swipe ups to DM. I've even gotten some business off of my personal.

Speaker 1: 8:00

I was writing some content for a website, like at nine o'clock at night in my bed, and so I posted a picture like hey, working on a client content or website copy and because of that, somebody scrolled up and they said, hey, how much is this service? And I sent them the link, they made an appointment with me and now I have them as a client. So it's all about how are we going to be able to reach those people and getting out of our normal stuff with social media to make it more engaging. All in all, I do not want you to feel like you are failing. If that engagement bar or number is so low. It's not you, it's them. You know, like, just like, if you break up with someone, right, it's not me, it's you, of course.

Speaker 1: 8:46

And so just make sure that you are focusing on those impressions and going through your analytics to make sure like oh, okay, so this piece of content actually got engagement. So, if that's the case, okay, so this piece of content actually got engagement. So, if that's the case, make more of those type of content posts. Or you know what, this one really didn't get a lot of impressions, or this time that I posted this actually worked. So let's do it at this time more and more and more again, because that's also important.

Speaker 1: 9:11

So focus on your content. Focus on how you can get outside of your box when it comes to creating content and really helping with the engagement, and also, lastly, preaching to the choir right now. This is for me too. We have to start being more engaging with our people on social media, because that's what we want back right and I was raised conservative and my mama always said you reap what you sow, shelby. So let's start sowing those good seeds of engaging and liking and commenting and sharing, so maybe people will actually start doing that with our stuff. All right, I'll catch you on the next episode.