Social Media Response Numbers

Sharing your email with your social network is a great way to spread the word about your business and grow your list. We make it easy for you to do this with social media icons you add right in your email. We will even track the clicks on these icons, just like we do for links included in your email.  But what do these social media response numbers mean?

The number you see on the Social Responses reporting dashboard under Social Reach reflects how many times your email was liked, reposted, or commented on through which ever social media program it was shared on. We are also reporting how many times the social media link is clicked as we do for any link in your email. These numbers have the potential to be wildly different, and in fact we're hoping they are. Here are some scenarios:

1. Someone clicks "like" in your email, but then doesn't follow through with the second click to actually like it on Facebook when they arrive at the hosted version of the email - in this case you would see a click on the link but none on the Social Reach count.
2. The email "goes viral" and gets a lot of "likes" from your social network once it's been posted on Facebook. In this example the Clicks From Email would be lower than the number in the Social Responses. For example, on Facebook, “Likes” could represent:

• A recipient likes the posted email, either from the received email or the archived version
• Anytime a Facebook friend or fan likes the archived email after it’s been posted on Facebook by you or by a recipient of your email

 * Note that the calculation and display of “Likes” is wholly controlled by Facebook, we simply render what their API returns to us.

Once an email is shared to the social media site by you or your recipient, the various social media services will track the item’s "likes" and return that info to us with a count of the total number of times the URL shared appears within their service.

One thing to note, there is currently a slight delay in how LinkedIn updates the count. Your email is being shared when the button is clicked, the stats just may take a bit longer to show than the other social media platforms.