I remember when a few years ago many customers said that “there was” to be on the internet and asked for web developments. Although they were not clear about why, they all seemed a phenomenon that stopped being a fad and became a trend. Today I think we are living a similar phenomenon, but with social networks. For many brands “you have to be” on Facebook or Twitter.
It is likely that they are not wrong, as it was also a success that many climbed the web a few years ago, today we have a digital platform of 1000 million users and it is difficult to find someone who doubts their proximity to people .
However, this work of communication with users around a brand is surrounded by different terms that sometimes get confused, overlap with others and many cases the managers of the companies do not understand what they are referring to or worse, they do not know what he serves them. One of them is the word “Engagement”.
The English term refers to “Commitment” and we can understand it today in social networks as that invisible force that moves users to interact with brands (for different reasons). Personally I think that even the term Commitment is great for a group of interactions – since one can interact with another without having more commitment – but today I am interested in reviewing two aspects that we must be clear about when evaluating the behavior of a brand in social networks.
Does an “” I Like “” weigh the same anywhere?
It seems today that “” I Like “” or “+1” is the most typical currency in social media; However, an I Like is not the same when we say “Good morning”, when we say “Meet our new product” or we have satisfactorily solved a user’s requirement. It is evident that there are “I Like” easier than others. When it comes to monitoring, we must have clarity at that point and give it the corresponding weight.
Are all engagement interactions the same?
This (fortunately) is the same as life itself. If we are telling something to a friend and this one moves our head affirmatively, we could interpret that it is apparently in agreement with what we say, although not much more … there we have our “I Like”. However, if we continue chatting and the friend feels that he needs to add something in the conversation, since it came in a deeper way … we have our “Comment”. Finally, if our friend considers that the talk was very good and needs to tell someone else, we have a “Share”.
If we look at for example, in many of the main retail stores, which in many cases tend to be the accounts with the most followers, in general there is a kind of engagement funnel, where most say “I Like”, then some less comments and only a small minority shares a post on Facebook. That is why when they say “the engagement of this week was XX” and the latter is a figure, we know that it is not the same to put all the interactions together, because each of them has a different level of depth in the user.
By joining the first with the second question, it is already possible to see that the metrics are not simple if we want to do it with all the subtleties and nuances of communication. We must make the right crosses in order to understand more accurately, how far we get with our content … if it is only superficially or we touch the emotions of the people.