Social media engagement is an essential part of any social media marketing strategy, but it seems that many of us do not have a clear understanding of what engagement is. Understanding the impact of social media engagement can be difficult, without having a thorough understanding of the term “engagement”. The interaction between people and brands on social media can be referred to as social media engagement. The key elements to building engagement are time, patience, trust, and valuable content. Making it about the customer, allowing them to feel as though there is something in it for them, will help to gain trust in the eyes of your consumers.

So what exactly is social media engagement?

Social media engagement can be defined as reaching out and getting a response from an audience, or in other words, catching the attention of consumers. Giving both the consumer and the business a voice and allowing them to interact with one another is also social media engagement. For example posting content on Twitter and a follower retweets your post.

SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS AND THEIR TAKE ON ENGAGEMENT

While most social media platforms are built to allow one similar concept, interacting and communicating with others, depending on their features, they all define engagement a little differently. Let’s take a look at some of the most used social media networks:

Facebook refers to engagement as their “engagement rate” and defines it as “ the percentage of people who saw a post that liked, shared, clicked or commented on it.”

Twitter defines engagement as “the total number of times a user interacted with a tweet”. Clicks anywhere on the tweet, including retweets, replies, follows, favorites, links, cards, hashtags, embedded media, username, profile photo, or tweet expansion”

Instagram’s definition of engagement is “the sum of likes and comments on one, individual Instagram post or all Instagram posts during an established time period.”

LinkedIn defines engagement as “the number of interactions plus the number of clicks and followers acquired, divided by the number of impressions.”

Understanding the insights of each social media network is crucial in measuring the impact of your social media marketing for your business. Knowing how each network measures it’s engagement will help you better understand what to use the different platforms for.

Is my social media marketing successful? How can I measure my engagement?

To answer these questions, you must first ask yourself, what successful social media marketing is to you and your business. In order to do that, you must set a goal and have an objective. For example, are you trying to gain more traffic on your page? Do you want to gain more sales? Once you have your goal and objective, measuring your engagement is simple. While there are countless ways to measure social media marketing and engagement, here are some simple and effective ways to do so.

  1. Do some research and find the items that are being retweeted or reposted. Keep in mind, several clicks come from those who aren’t following you, but stumble upon your page thanks to your followers that choose to share your content. Start monitoring what is shared to see which items your audience enjoys most, then build on it. Start providing your consumers with more of what they want.
  2. Compare the amount of likes, comments and reposts between the different types of content you post to see which type of content is more appealing to your audience. Ex. you may notice that posting items with more of visuals are more popular among your consumers than an article with just writing.
  3. Create a business hashtag and monitor how and when it is being used on different social media platforms. Think outside the box and create a promotion or campaign, but don’t forget to create a hashtag for it and watch how it trends.
  4. Take note of what is said about your business anytime it is mentioned on another website and respond to questions and compliments when possible. Doing so will allow you to create better interaction, therefore creating exposure of your business to new viewers.

Understanding what social media engagement is and how it is measured will give you better insight on what content to provide your viewers with, the impact of your marketing, and will allow you to build your business.

How do you engage your social media subscribers?

 

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