Looking back on social media over the last year we have seen many trends. Some of the biggest topics were focusing on the ROI of social media and then again on the value of “engagement”. Before I go off on a full rant, I want to make something clear. Having your friends, family, customers and fans interact with you on social media is incredibly valuable because you’re building a relationship. Getting a random person to click the like button on your picture of a cute animal offers nowhere near the same value.Several brands get tunnel vision and only look at the numbers–likes, fans, followers, views, retweets etc. When you are only trying to raise those numbers your direction shifts. Even if it’s only a small shift, it makes a big difference over time. Let’s say your original goal was to create better relationships with your customers to encourage brand loyalty and repeat business. During this process you started measuring your success by some of the pre-mentioned interactions. Your team is now putting their efforts, time and thought into getting those numbers up instead of building relationships with your customers. So you and/or your team is thinking about it like this:
Success = Engagement and Engagement = Interaction
The problem: Interaction can be mindless. People don’t have to make a connection to your brand or business in order to play a game on your Facebook page or see and “like” a funny or cute picture that you posted. All the interaction in the world might not do anything to creating a better relationship or promoting repeat business (your original goals). In other words, there’s no ROI for simple interaction.
In social media I have come to understand:Valuable Engagement = Attention + Perceived Value + Interaction
This means that your customer/fan sees value in something you provided, they pay attention enough to understand that information and how it relates to your brand or business (why you posted it), and then they respond in one way or another. As you continue to provide value, they continue to see the value in you and start to develop the relationship with your company/brand. This relationship affects their choices in the future, specifically their purchasing decisions.The BIG difference between the two is VALUE! I know that we talk about this all the time, but this specific rant is meant to encourage everyone to redefine “engagement” or at least to start to shoot for “valuable engagement” instead.
I would love to hear your thoughts on engagement in social media. Feel free to shoot me and questions or thoughts on Twitter or post it up on our Facebook page.
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