Engagement is Key to Social Media Success

Often times success on social media is measured by number of followers or follower to following ratio. It is surface level attractiveness of a page that is spotted at first glance and while this can be attractive and feel like a successful page, the activities of those followers is what actually matters. Without the engagement of those followers, even just a like, can cause more attraction to the post and gain more views, likes, shares, etc. Engagement remains a critical piece of success on any social media platform and Katie Paine covers why in her book, “Measure what matters.”

Paine gives three reasons as to why engagement is so important to succeeding in social media. The first reason is engagement is key to building a relationship with customers, Paine says. This engagement not only allows your brand to be seen by more consumers and build a brand loyalty, but it also allows businesses to attempt to track customers’ involvement in your business. I say attempt because it isn’t possible to track 100 percent of your customers 100 percent of the time.

Another key reason for engagement is promotion. Every brand is constantly chasing more promotion and social media is a great way to promote any product or service and track how well the promotion is doing. This can give businesses ideas on what to improve on ads, when to post ads and what market to target their ads to. The beauty of social media is all of the information and analytics given to you in order to track posts. Promotion can come easier with more engagement and if a post isn’t doing as well as it should be or as the business thinks it should be, social media offers options to “promote” posts and pay for the post to show up on pages it wouldn’t normally show up on.

The last reason why engagement is so important in tracking social media is improvement on already existing products. Customers can use comments to express opinions on certain products or services and these comments go directly to the business. This can allow for consumer criticism on the products being promoted. Products can then be assessed and improved by engineers and production teams.

Engagement allows all of these processes to become useful to the business in many different scenarios and without engagement on social media businesses would surely suffer. Paine stresses how important it is to track this engagement and improve posts and products from there.