David Bridges
Key Insights
- Engagement Impact: Engaging with your audience significantly affects social media reach.
- Response Effectiveness: Responding to comments can increase overall post engagement.
- Platform Variance: The increase in engagement varies across platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram.
- Algorithm Influence: Social media algorithms favor posts with higher engagement, boosting visibility.
Engaging with your audience is a key element of social media, which can have a big impact on reach, because more engagement indicates more interest, etc.
But how much impact does engaging with people really have, like, for example when you respond to their comments on your own updates?
That’s what Buffer sought to find out in its latest research report, by analyzing engagements with over 2 million posts, across various platforms, to see whether responding to people actually helps to increase post engagement as a result.
Which it should. Algorithms will show you when people you follow have replied to posts, boosting post exposure within personal networks, while interacting will likely prompt more people to respond.
And according to Buffer’s data, looking at the average interactions, replying to comments can have a significant impact on overall interaction, with Threads seeing the biggest increase in activity as a result of replying to comments.
As you can see in this chart, posts in which the creator has replied to comments see 42% more engagement overall, based on Buffer’s analysis.
Which, again, makes sense, though it is also worth noting that this type of analysis is not definitive, as it could be that more popular posts just see more replies, which could skew the data.
But looking at the broader scope, the data does seem to suggest that there’s a positive correlation between posts where the creator is engaging with the comments, as opposed to simply posting their update and moving on.
The relative engagement boost for comments is variable across each platform:
- LinkedIn posts see a 30% increase in overall engagement when the creator replies to comments
- Instagram posts see a 21% increase
- Facebook engagement rises by 9% on average
- Twitter sees an 8% increase in overall activity as a result of interacting with your audience
Again, this is a difficult element to measure, because there are a lot of variables at play, including what the post is (i.e. a post that poses a question will see more comments, as will a poll), who’s posting, what the specifics of the dataset are, etc.
But looking at the averages, across a large sample set of posts, Buffer’s research suggests that there is a strong correlation between engaging with the comments and increasing post reach.
And on Threads specifically, that’s at least partially by design.
As Buffer notes, the Threads team has intentionally sought to give replies more presence in the app, in order to encourage interaction.
As Instagram chief Adam Mosseri told The Verge shortly after Threads was launched:
“Elevating the reply to the same level as the original post allows for much more robust, diverse discourse, which is part of the reason we didn’t just try to shove this thing into the feed on Instagram or a separate tab.”
Every social app has faced challenges in this regard, because users simply aren’t posting as much as they used to, or commenting in public social feeds. Many users are now much more wary about saying the wrong thing, and being called out for such, or having their opinions held against them in perpetuity. So they’ve reverted to interacting in private chats instead, though really, only a small percentage of users have ever been heavily engaged in posting on social apps.
On X, for example, 100% of the content posted in the app is created by 20% of X users. The other 80% never post, or even engage in the app, they just read through the X feed (this has been the case for some time, and presumably this is still the case).
So engagement is limited, and always has been, yet it’s also the key indicator of interest and activity that all social platform algorithms use to dictate reach.
Given this, it makes sense that more replies equate to better performance, but it is worth noting the importance of replying, and engaging with your audience, to encourage this activity.
So while I would say that this data is not definitive, it is indicative, and a good guide as to how you should be spending your time if maximum reach is your goal.
You can read Buffer’s full engagement study here.
Maya Kensington
