What Is Social Engagement?
Today, internet users are bombarded with content. For social media marketers, this means that it is crucial to comprehend what content will resonate with the target audience and which will fall flat. The goal is to increase engagement and traffic to your site.
Engagement is not just a simple number of followers, it is a bit more complicated than that. It would be better to define it as interactions with your brand. Also, when you add to the fact that every social channel is different and that the engagement varies from one channel to the other, you realize that it is not that easy to measure engagement.
Measuring social engagement helps you get all the necessary metrics. However, not all of them are equally significant. Keep reading and find out how important engagement is and what you need to measure to see if your content is engaging.
Engagement Vs. Reach
“Reach” is not a metric that means a lot. When we are talking about certain content’s reach, we are actually talking about the number of people that have seen it. In a way, reach is like vanity metrics, and it’s also easy to manipulate. Just think about click baits or paid content promotion ads. All of that gives you brief interaction but usually nothing more.
Instead, you need to track conversions.
We are creating content not only for people to read and then immediately forget about it, but also because we want them to take an action. The conversion rate is the number of audience replies per post or comment. This is what you should track, it’s more important than how far your content reaches.
Engagement Vs. Time on Page
Even though “Time on Page” sounds like a better measure of engagement than reach, in reality, it’s a heavily skewed metric. Why is that?
Well, in website analytics, the “time on page” is calculated as the time between the visit to the first page and the next page. This would be ok if we all browsed a site in a linear mode, by clicking links to other pages and leaving when we’re done. But, this is not the case.
We open multiple tabs and we walk away from devices, we get distracted. That’s why “Time on page” is a questionable metric, we can’t really get true results.
On the other hand, you should track “scroll depth” instead. It measures how far down a page visitor scrolls. It’s not 100% certain, but, if you take into account that most of your visitors are making it to the end of your post, you should be safe to assume you’re doing something right.
Engagement Vs. Shares
Measuring social sharing is a good way to figure out if the right people are engaging. However, don’t try to use it to understand which content is capturing most of someone’s attention. To measure the success of your content you should track comments.
Usually, visitors don’t comment if they are not genuinely engaged with it.
Measuring Engagement
You can always calculate numbers on your own, but if you’re not good at math you should try something else.
Luckily, TrueSocialMetrics made it super easy, for all of us who don’t get along well with numbers. Once you sign up you should add connections to all your social networks and start calculating data right away.
Next, you add all the numbers to the spreadsheet so you can send it to your client or your staff.
Our advice is to capture your metrics weekly so at the end of the month you know how well you did during the previous month.
Wrapping Up
In every form of marketing, online or offline, paid or organic, international or local, we always need to understand what is and what isn’t working.
It’s crucial to measure engagement in the right way in order to understand how people are really responding to your content. It’s not only about the clicks and likes. It’s about how many people are being driven to your page and how involved they are with the content.
When you know what is working and what is not working, you will know how to keep creating content that is better than the last.