A No BS Guide to Why ‘Engagement’ Matters

There are no tips in this post.

There’s little-to-no mention of tools.

Those have been well covered by many others.

Instead, this is a persuasive argument to prove why social media engagement is critical.

Because no one ever answers that.

Arm-chair ‘social media experts’ say that it is. But don’t go on to define it.

What’s worse, most of the media just confuse things further. Once-great institutions turned rags, like Forbes, now regularly spew unhelpful garbage.

The problem is that if you don’t understand how or why something is important, you have zero chance successfully implementing it. No matter how many tactics are copied and pasted.

So here’s a no-BS approach to back up why ‘engagement’ matters.

But first, the facts.

How Social Media Works

Permission Marketing hit bookstores (remember those?) in 1999.

Also from 99: the Snake mobile game, overhead projectors, CD-ROMs, and dial up modems. Oh, andTRL.

The book’s premise was simple: in these ‘heady days’ of ‘technological innovation’ (lots of air quotes), the future of promotion will be more about engagement, less about interruption.

Fast forward to 2009, and Inbound Marketing hit first edition Kindle’s everywhere.

Different titles, same premise.

As more and more people move online, the future of brand promotion is through interaction on these new mediums. Less so on old broadcast or static ones (because it’s tough to see a billboard while driving when you’re trying to text your friend back).

For years now, this has all played out pretty much as advertised (pun).

And the #1 destination this happens is social. Specifically, Facebook.

The trouble is, social activity often lacks intent.

That means people don’t go there because of your 2-for-1 discount. Instead, it’s usually to kill a few minutes or procrastinate, with brands benefiting through serendipity.

So the primary social marketing objective is to grab people’s attention, first, in order to give yourself a fighting chance.

And increasing your ability to gain attention in social media starts with engagement.

How Social Media Engagement Drives ‘Reach’

In the stone age of advertising, there were two important concepts to measure:

• Reach: the total number of people being exposed to your message
• Frequency: the number of times those people are being exposed (that sounds kinda dirty)

Social media hasn’t changed marketing, so those two things are still very relevant.

Today, ‘Reach’ is measured through many things, including impressions and views. And many times, as in the case of Facebook, increasing organic (unpaid) reach is entirely dependent on engagement.

Why? Natural amplification. Your social activity is broadcasted throughout your social graph, so when you ‘Like’ that funny cat meme, your friends are now alerted to the existence of that funny cat meme too.

The other reason is EdgeRank, the algorithm designed to control how far and wide your messages can go, to help them control how often brands can annoy users. (Also, to spend more in advertising.)

Fan engagement with content updates (Likes, comments, answering questions, etc.) are ‘votes’, similar to how backlinks help drive greater visibility through search engines.

The point is that greater post engagement drives reach (and not the other way around). Pull up your own Facebook Insights account right now, and you’ll see this play out for your most popular posts:

And if you zoom out a little bit, stacking Post Reach over Reactions, Comments and Shares over time, you’ll again see the correlation:

All social networks work this way to some degree or another. Seer’s excellent Pinterest Guideshows similar results, where their Analytics dashboard shows the symbiotic relationship between more engagement (repins, clicks, likes) and more impressions (reach).

So that’s it. Game over. Article finished.

Right?

Unfortunately, there are still few problems in proving that engagement has a greater impact beyond spreading your message a little further.

3 Common Problems with Proving ‘Engagement’ Matters

‘Likes’ on Facebook can help increase the reach of that post. Sure.

But do ‘Likes’ translate into sales?

As one unfortunate man found out, the answer is a resounding nope.

Here’s why:

Problem #1. Traditional Engagement Metrics Fall Short

Sure, Likes and Favorites are a start. But they don’t go far enough in proving that ‘engagement’ drives real business objectives.

Ian Michiels from Gleanster gets a step further with the Mean Performance Social Media Score (MPS). But I barely had time to write this post, let alone set-up a new custom dashboard this morning.

Click through data (using UTM parameters, Bitly, or similar) is a start, but only if someone actually does anything in that current session. Same holds true for discount codes or coupons, which only help if people take action immediately (which as already discussed, is unlikely).

Thankfully there’s Klout. Just kidding, nobody uses that garbage.

Current methods of measuring engagement, while sounding nice in a Press Release, barely scratch the surface of foreshadowing any meaningful impact.

Problem #2: The Great Attribution Gap

Full funnel attribution is currently, and for the foreseeable future, a nightmare. Yes, it’s possible. Kinda. Sorta. But in reality, for most companies, it’s almost not worth the effort.

Tools like HubSpot, Mixpanel or Kissmetrics can help dramatically, getting you extremely close without pulling your own hair out.

Kissmetrics even provides a pretty infographic showing how it works (just in case, like me, you have trouble staying focused for longer than 2 seconds and need something shiny to look at).

But let’s assume for now that you can’t draw a straight line between ‘engagement’ and sales. Because in many cases, you can’t. At least not with 100% accuracy.

Problem #3: Declining Organic Performance

Let’s not beat around the bush here…

Organic reach on Facebook continues to decline. The reasons aren’t so mysterious.

But this trend is inevitable, as all social networks are ad-based platforms that will follow suit. The category leader sets the pace.

This is one reason why former Forrester VP, Nate Elliott, urges marketers to stop measuring social engagement altogether.

He makes some great points. But others are a bit simplistic. And the cynic in me can’t help but distrust analysts, sitting in their ivory tower, making recommendations – compared with the work of practitioners in the trenches.

So what to do?

Unfortunately, until something better comes along, we have to rely on correlation data.

Admittedly, it’s going out on a bit of a limb. But then again, that’s how pretty much every other promotion vehicle is measured. And if we’re putting the ROI of social media up against billboards and print ads, I’ll take that bet.

The good news is that there are a few good case studies out there to pull from.

How Social Media Engagement Drives ROI

Social media’s not the best, direct sales driver.

But it can be a powerful, indirect, sales assistor (not gonna lie, had to double check spelling on that one).

Here’s a brief summary of two favorite examples:

• Step2 saw sales jump 130% year over year with greater social integration.
• Moz’s cost of customer acquisition is a pittance at $131, because they acquire ~85% of their customers through ‘inbound’ channels and don’t have a sales team. And have grown revenue 21.6% in the past year. So it seems like it’s working.

The trick with ‘engagement’ based, social media correlation data, is that you can’t point to a single discernible area where it has the greatest impact. Instead, it’s the entire funnel.

Here’s why.

Mckinsey illustrated how massive brands use social to support the entire customer journey.

The best example comes from a telecommunications company that decided to test the waters, modeling their social strategy and tactics after other successful benchmarks of similar companies.

While they were running largely off anecdotal evidence, they also made a few assumptions about how they’d benefit:

Assumption #1. There should be more positive posts online if these activities improve “general service perceptions about the brand” (as measured using BuzzMetrics)

The first point emphasizes positive online reviews, which play a significant role by influencing theZero Moment of Truth. These would obviously help increase things like credibility and trust, which are essential, but difficult to track objectively.

Assumption #2. They should see better search performance with added clicks and traffic from social sharing.

The second point focuses on increasing search visibility, which drives the most direct conversions(largely due to people searching with intent at the Bottom of the Funnel).

Assumption #3. If these things happen, they should be able to measure the indirect sales impact at some level against other media types using their “average” gross rating point (GRP) of ad expenditures (which measures the size of an audience a media vehicle generates).

The third makes the assumption that if the first two occur as expected, they’ll stand to gain from the powerful, yet indirect sales growth (the definition of ‘correlation’).

The results?

The company concluded that social-media activity not only boosted sales but also had higher ROIs than traditional marketing did.

Thus, while the company took a risk by shifting emphasis toward social-media efforts before it had data confirming that this was the correct course, the bet paid off.

What’s more, the analytic baseline now in place has given the company confidence to continue exploring a growing role for social media.

Sounds great, right?!

But how’d it happen?

They:

• Used Twitter as a new customer service platform. You know, to talk to people.
• Ran social contests at the center of promotional campaigns. You know, to get people involved and reward their interaction.
• Create a Facebook page that offered ‘tech tips’. You know, to educate and inform.
• And even responded to people in real-time who mentioned their brand. You know, to ENGAGE!

These tactical elements are pretty basic. These activities used by a massive enterprise can be carried out by startups as well.

The scale is different. But the foundation is is the same. Engagement.

Conclusion

Engagement matters because…

People don’t buy shit from people they don’t know, like, or trust.

Today, awareness, trust, and affinity are largely built online. On mobile devices. And on social platforms. Long before they call you or set foot in your store.

Despite that, social media accounts for less than 1 percent of average marketing budgets.

Why?

I don’t know. Because of the problems listed above. Because of plausible deniability perhaps.

The funny thing, is that you can’t do one without the other today. ‘SEO’ for example can’t existwithout ‘engagement’ (largely through social). These channels NEED one another to work successfully.

Actually talking with customers (gulp!), is now a necessary evil. Whether we like it or not.

Yes, engagement matters.

It’s tough to define. It’s tough to track.

But the results are there if you’re willing to give it a shot.

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3 Social Media Engagement Techniques That Work

Need some new social media marketing ideas?

Looking for ways to jumpstart your engagement?

Whether your goal is to spread awareness or grow your audience, better engagement is your key to success.

In this article you’ll discover three ways to improve engagement for your social media accounts.

#1: Personalize Your Approach

Your audience is the greatest asset for your campaign. To run a successful social campaign with plenty of engagement, you have to know your audience and what they’re likely to respond to and enjoy.

To gain these insights, you’ll need to do some research. Find out which social media channels the people you want to reach spend the most time on. Discover what topics they care about and what hashtags they use.

Don’t just listen to your audience, but communicate with them. When you show your fans that you’re interested and you care, and they’ll show you what makes them happy. Once you know what they’re looking for, you can launch a social media campaign that they’ll embrace.

Many brands have leveraged Pinterest to run successful social campaigns, including Kotex’sWoman’s Inspiration Day. The company looked at the Pinterest boards for 50 inspiring women to see what interested them.

Kotex then brought their inspirations to life by creating handmade gifts and sending them to the women as virtual gifts. If the women then posted something about their virtual gift, they received a real gift from the company in the mail.

Almost all of the 50 women responded, generating 2,284 interactions and 694,853 impressions on Pinterest. The campaign was a huge hit because Kotex was able to hyper-target a specific audience and what they want. This is just one of many examples of how you can use Pinterest to launch a successful social campaign.

#2: Put the Product in Your Fan’s Hands

Remember the core goal of social media is to be social, so it’s important to cultivate relationships with your fans and followers. This is an essential step to launching a successful social media campaign.

Yes, your ultimate goal is to sell your product and your brand, but for the purposes of your social media campaign, take a step back on the selling and simply share. Don’t force your product or your brand on your audience or they’ll stop listening to you. Opt for subtlety instead. Give people a way to share your product in a fun and unique way and let your audience come to it.

Ford’s Fiestagram Instagram campaign created buzz for the release of their new Fiesta model by asking fans to post pictures that related to different campaign hashtags.

Each hashtag was a buzzword describing one of the features of the new Fiesta car, such as #music, #entry, #hidden, etc. Ford then chose the best pictures for each hashtag and displayed them on digital billboards. They also awarded weekly prizes to fans who submitted photos for the campaign.

More than 16,000 photos were submitted to the Fiestagram campaign and Ford gained 120,000 new fans on their social media pages.

Lay’s launched the clever Do Us a Flavor campaign on Facebook that asked fans and consumers to come up with a new flavor of potato chip for the company to create and sell. That year, nearly 4 million people submitted their flavor ideas via Facebook or text message.

Lay’s Do Us a Flavor campaign asked fans to submit ideas for a new flavor of potato chip.

Once the finalists were chosen, Lay’s asked fans to vote for the winning flavor on Facebook, receiving over 1 million votes. The prize for the winning flavor was $1 million (or 1% of sales for the chip flavor). The first campaign increased Lay’s sales by 12% and was so successful at generating engagement for the brand that they continue to run it each year.

If you offer your fans a chance to showcase their creativity and connect it to one of your products, you can establish a respectful relationship with your audience, linking their personal creations to your company.

#3: Play the Tag Game

Before you launch a social media campaign, you need to know what your goal is. Without a firm plan in mind, you’re almost certainly setting yourself up for failure. It’s important to identify not only what you want to accomplish, but also the audience you’re targeting and how you want to connect with them.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge campaign was launched to raise awareness and funding for ALS. The “challenge” was for people to dump a bucket of ice over their heads and record a video of it to increase awareness of the disease.

People who took the challenge spurred more engagement by nominating others to take the challenge.

After each challenge, the person taking it would nominate two or three more people to take the challenge and so on until people around the world were participating. The campaign grew exponentially in a short amount of time. So what made this campaign great? The call to action: Dump ice water on your head, and tag someone else to participate. It was simple, but impactful.

In your social campaigns, use a simple call to action to make it easy for people to complete the goal.

Over to You

Social media is one of the greatest tools you can use to grow your business and promote your brand. Launching social media campaigns helps you spread awareness and build an audience.

To jumpstart participation in your social media campaign, you need a core group of people who are 100% behind your launch to get it off the ground. One way to do that is to create a beta group and give them exclusive perks.

What do you think? Have you used these tactics in your social media campaigns? What tips can you offer? 

Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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4 Ways to Optimize Pinterest Content for Engagement and SEO

Are you making the most out of Pinterest? Sure, you have a presence there, but are your Pins the most appealing they could be visually? Are they being re-Pinned to boards that help or hurt your brand? Is your Pinterest profile as strong as it should be from an SEO perspective?

These are big questions that you might not be asking yourself, but that can go a long way towards boosting your Pinterest endeavors, web conversions, and, ultimately, purchases.

Optimize by Color

Optimizing your Pins by color is easy if you have the right tool. For instance, our new Pinterest Channel Report can tell you which colors in your Pins get you the most engagement in sum, and also engagement per Pin.

This kind of insight can help you optimize speedily, especially if you’re creating content specifically for Pinterest.

What You Should Do: Understand which colors work best for your Pins, then plan a suite of Pinterest content using that color as a jumping-off point.

Optimize by Boards

How are your Pinterest boards doing? By this I mean:

• Which of your boards have the most followers?
• Which of your boards generate the most engagement?
• Which of your boards receive the most Likes, specifically? Comments? Repins?

By looking at all your board statistics in one place (like you can in our new Pinterest Channel Report), you can see which boards need TLC and which are doing just fine, thankyouverymuch. You can also get a good idea of which Pins best fit the Pinterest climate
and tastes.

For example, maybe your home interior design boards are most popular, but your primary goal currently is to generate interest for you restaurant interior design boards. Once understand the reality of what folks are attracted to vs. what you want them to be attracted to, you’ll be able to figure out which elements you need to tweak to find the sweet spot for success.

What You Should Do: First thing’s first: find out which of your boards are most popular. If there’s a disparity between your most popular boards and your desired target audience, make the necessary tweaks and keep track of how the boards your board statistics evolve over time depending on the Pins you throw up there.

Create new spin-off boards based on your most popular boards for wider, more successful brand exposure.

Finally, reach out to the Pinners who love your boards the most. These are your super fans — and potential brand advocates. Form influencer partnerships with these Pinners, and/or ask them to guest Pin for your boards to increase exposure for your brand.

Optimize by SEO

Another way to increase your brand’s discoverability is to optimize your Pinterest profile for SEO, so that when someone Googles your topic of expertise, your brand’s Pinterest profile is one of the first search results.

What You Should Do: Make sure your Pinterest profile (and Pins) do the following:

• Include your business name is in the account name and username (duh)
• Include relevant SEO keywords in your brand description, but still stylishly rep your brand personality
• Include searchable keywords in alt text on the images you pull from your website
• Use  Pinterest autocomplete function to formulate excellent long-tail keywords for relevant Pins
• Use the Google Keyword Planner to look for promising long-tail keywords you would like ranked, then head to Pinterest and see if there are already boards ranked for that keyword. If not, create a new board using these keywords
  

Optimize by Links

According to this Pinterest/Shopify 2015 infographic, Pinterest is a key social network for generating a ton of traffic, and not just any ol’ traffic — quality traffic.

I’m guessing your brand wants a piece of that, so make sure the links for all your Pins are still working: if you’re trying to generate web conversions from Pinterest, it won’t work if you’re sending folks to dead ends.

What You Should Do: Conduct a monthly audit of all your Pins to make sure that all links are active.

Pinterest Is Ever-Evolving

Pinterest is updating rapidly, with a new kind of visual search and buyable pins rolled out to most users with major brands like Nordstrom and Macy’s on board. Keep current on the latest Pinterest developments by checking the Simply Measured blog regularly for news and always-strategic tips.

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Use This Stupid-Simple Secret Ingredient to Boost Social Engagement

Every day, for hours on end, social media teams across the country — around the world, even — toil away in poorly lit rooms, snacking periodically on stale donuts and swilling hours-old cold coffee, trying to come up with new ways to solve one huge, gaping problem plaguing marketers of all stripes:

No one cares about our social content enough to give it a like, a retweet, a comment, or even a share.

All is not lost. I’ve stumbled upon a stupid-simple way to dramatically increase your social engagement, and it’s actually a lot of fun. Ready for it? It’s emojis!

An Emoji Is Worth A Thousand Words

Emojis are super-powerful because they allow us to communicate so much more than we could with words alone. People are apt to respond positively to your messages when you form an emotional connection, however brief.

That’s a fist-bump emoji, in case it’s not clear.

Think of the sheer volume of words people sift through in a day, especially online across media, websites, email and text messages.

People are overwhelmed with words.

We know that people process visuals 60,000 times faster than plain text, and emojis are a great way to tap into that image power in your social posts, where space is at a premium.

Using Emojis Without Being A Total Cheeseball

Emojis only get a bad name when people abuse their emoji powers. I’ve pretty much memorized the entire emoji character set and try to introduce them in conversations wherever it makes sense.

There are so many opportunities. And there’s so much more to a smart emoji strategy than just throwing in a smiley face.

Just do a Google search and check out which emojis are available on your device or operating system:

Instead of throwing around emojis haphazardly, consider contextual relevancy. If you’re talking about junk food, you can use a donut. A conversation about an event in a specific country allows you to insert an emoji of the flag.

Social Networks & Operating Systems Know the Power of Emojis

Emojis are so impactful that Facebook has spent an inordinate amount of time and resources developing and testing a set of six additional emoji-like “reactions” to join the thumbs-up button.

Image source: Facebook

Right now, they’re being tested only in Spain and Ireland, but they may eventually roll out to all users worldwide.

Apple released a slate of new and updated emojis for iOS 9.1 last month, adding a burrito, a middle finger, a robot and even a unicorn to the mix.

Image source: Apple

If you look at my Twitter and Facebook feeds, I never do an update without at least one emoji, and often I’ll do replies and updates completely lacking in words, with just emojis.

Seriously, with such a selection across platforms, who needs words? Think about it — how weird would it be in real life to have a conversation with someone without showing any emotion at all? Emojis help solve a major problem in online communications: the missing context of emotion.

Posts With Emojis Increase Social Engagement

The key to doing both paid and organic social is to get those engagement rates up. In organic social, this helps your content get more exposure.

Unfortunately, when it comes to organic social media marketing, it’s super-hard to figure out which update does better or worse because there are so many different variables at play.

However, in paid social, it’s super-easy to do a split test of the same promoted post with and without emojis to the same targeting group at the same time.

Here’s just one small example, between this tweet with no emoji and the same image and message plus emojis:

As you can see, the emoji version has 25.4 percent higher engagement (11.06 percent vs. 8.82 percent) and a 22.2 percent lower cost per engagement ($0.18 vs. $0.14). Remember: Twitter Quality Score rewards higher post engagement with lower CPEs. So using emojis will not only increase engagement, it will decrease your costs, too.

Like I said, we’re seeing this as a trend consistently across tests (Sometimes the emoji variant beats out the non-emoji promoted post by as much 3x), but I’ve noticed that it’s key that your emojis are relevant to the update.

Test it out for yourself!

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