Understanding Social Visibility and If You Are Being Shadowbanned

If you're doing social media marketing, you want to ensure your content gets as much visibility as possible. This is important as it will affect the number of times new customers see your brand. Social visibility measures your brand's visibility and presence across different social media platforms.

When you understand and improve your efforts, you can reach more potential customers, increase engagement, and impact your brand’s influence. In this article, we dive into social visibility and help you understand how shadowbanning affects it. We also provide actionable tips on increasing your brand's social visibility.

What is Social Visibility?

Social visibility measures how prominently your brand appears on different social media platforms. It's a good metric to ensure that you're not only posting for the sake of it, but that your content is also resonating well with the algorithm and your target audience. Social visibility is more than just the view; it involves creating consistent ways of improving the perception and interaction between your audience and the target audience.

To increase your social visibility, you need to consider several factors, such as:

• Content quality and relevance.
• Driving the engagement level between your audience and followers.
• Be consistent in posting content and driving interaction.
• Being strategic in your use of keywords and hashtags

How to Determine Your Social Visibility

By measuring the social visibility of your brand, you can understand its impact, identify areas for improvement, and benchmark against your competitors. Many metrics can help you measure the social visibility of your brand, such as:

The Social Media Reach

Social media reach refers to the number of unique accounts that see your content. For instance, if 14,000 people saw your Instagram post, its social media reach is 14,000. This is a good metric to help you determine if your social media strategy is working or if you need to make adjustments. You can find the reach on most platforms by looking at the analytics or using third-party listening tools.

Volume of Mentions

Mentions can be a good indicator of the number of people talking about your brand. If you receive a high number of mentions, it will increase your social visibility. Therefore, ensure you track your mentions, respond to them, and keep everything positive. Doing so will keep your fans happy and talking about your brand.

Presence Score

This is a metric that shows how often your brand is positively visible online. If you are getting a high presence score, it means you are the talk of the town. By measuring this figure, you can determine the impact of your brand and whether your social media strategy is effective.

Share of Voice

Share of voice can help you understand your market share compared to your competition. This is a suitable method for benchmarking against your competitors and strategizing how to improve. You want to improve this metric so that when people discuss things in your niche, you will be the topic of discussion.

How Shadowbanning Affects Your Social Visibility  

One factor affecting social visibility is shadowbanning. This involves the social media platform limiting the visibility of a user’s content rather than blocking or banning it. Since the user continues to see their content, they get a false sense of normalcy. However, in the real sense, their posts aren't visible to other people on the platform as before.

This happens because social media algorithms determine whether to show a user’s content to a broader audience or hide it. They consider different factors, such as the nature of the content, engagement rate, and influence of the person who posted. Therefore, if you're posting on Instagram, you need to understand how to beat the Instagram algorithm and also how to avoid being shadowbanned.

For instance, if the user is regularly flagged for violating the community guidelines, often shares inappropriate content, or engages in spammy behavior, their account may be shadowbanned. This means their content will be hidden entirely from the feed or given less priority, reducing its reach, impact, and social visibility. You can read our guide on shadow banning and how to overcome it.

How to Increase Your Social Visibility

If your social visibility has decreased because of being shadowbanned, you must follow the platform's policies and guidelines to overcome it. Additionally, there are several steps you can take to increase your social visibility. These are:

Content Optimization

To ensure that your content appears when people search for a keyword in your niche, include relevant keywords and hashtags. However, when doing that, remember that you don’t have to overstuff keywords. Instead, create great content that is free of grammatical errors and answers your audience’s search query.

Understand the Best Posting Time

Another way of increasing social visibility is by posting when your audience is online. Different social media platforms have other times when audiences are most active. This often depends on the industry, audience, and platform. For instance, it's not a good idea to post LinkedIn content on Saturday afternoons when most professionals are taking a break from their screens.

On the other hand, when you post on Instagram on a Monday morning, the content may not get much traction as people are busy either with work or school. Therefore, you must plan, study your metrics and data, and schedule your upcoming posts to go live when your audience is mostly online.

Engage with Followers

Remember that social media content marketing isn't like traditional media, where communication is one-way. Instead, social media offers you the opportunity to engage with your audience. When they comment on your posts, be sure to respond to them. Doing so will enable you to build lasting relationships.

Therefore, you're missing a valuable opportunity for deeper relationships and engagement if you're not listening to your audience. If you only talk to your followers, your brand will appear inauthentic and unapproachable. Additionally, you can get valuable feedback from the comments section.

Influencer Collaboration

Ensure that you collaborate with influencers whose values align with yours and whose audience is your target audience. Influencer marketing works by putting your brand before the influencer's large audience. When combined with SEO strategies, influencer marketing can increase your online awareness and brand visibility. People who follow the influencer can contribute to branded searches, increasing your brand’s credibility.

In Conclusion

Social visibility is a key factor affecting a brand's success. To maintain high social visibility, you need to avoid getting shadowbanned. You can do that by following the rules and regulations of the social media platform. You can also use the topics above to increase your social visibility. You can read our guide on Instagram content strategy.