Deep Thoughts by Brenda- Community Engagement by the Numbers

Social media statistics are pretty reliable. 80% of your followers on a particular channel will never engage – ever. 16% will engage occasionally, and 4% will be your active community. (You'll often hear me mention my “4%ers” – they know who they are.)

Here in the Suite, we've had some mega posts lately, and it might look like the Suite is over-the-top active. But from a mathematical perspective? Still averaging around 4% of our total community, when you look at the engagement (likes/comments) against our total population. Last night's post had around 1.5K likes and comments. But against our base of 30K? Dead on 5%.

So what does this mean. If you have a community of 200 people (followers, likes, group members) and are getting reliably 8-10 people engaging, you're doing good. If you get 20-30? You're doing GREAT!

Let's say you have a bigger following of 5000 on a particular channel. Healthy stats would indicate that around 200-300 will actively engage. (Not coincidentally, this is what my Instagram following is, and nearly dead-on where my stats are.)

This is a number to really analyze, to figure out if your content is working. Serve your 4%ers well – love them. And they will help bring out the 16%ers. So my challenge to you is this. Go look at your following, and look at one of your recently highly engaging posts. See what your engagement ratio is (add up the total likes and comments, divide by your following on that channel). If it's dramatically less than 4%, you need to refocus on your strategy.

Yes, this is literally 80/20 math. 80% of your content will only be seen or actively engaged on by 20% (or less) of your community. And is exactly why your content and relationship strategy are so important.

Edited to add:
The bigger the community, the lower the average percentage will be because people are often hesitant to post/like/comment in huge groups. So Facebook algorithms literally work against us. The less someone engages, the less FB will show the content in the newsfeed. So again – strategy. Content, relationships, engagement.