That was the question I got at a client meeting last week. That’s the kicker with social media engagement. If you don’t see the likes, and if people don’t respond to your questions, you wonder if anyone is really paying attention. That’s also why so many consulting firms scramble to try to figure out how to measure something that is almost unmeasurable. Sure, you can track likes, you can track visits to your website, however, in social media engagement you can’t track every set of eyes that may have seen your message scroll across the news feed. People may try, and they might estimate what these numbers are – you just can’t know for sure.
Here’s what I do know, and what I told my client. If we took a look at the four basic personality quadrants, each one uses social media a little bit differently. You have your social fun lovers – these are the liker’s and commenter’s on nearly every post. You have your drivers, the get it done people who are in and out to see what they need to see, take action and move on. You have the analytics, who will, when they find a spellign error on your website (yes, I did that on purpose) will take a picture of the error and let you know about it. Finally, you have the loyal listeners, watchers, and lurkers. This segment accounts for approximately 40% of the population. You can’t get them to click a button unless they really, really have something to say, and I mean really. In a conversation with one person who fits into this personality type perfectly, they said they wrote a response comment on Facebook and debated about pressing the enter button for 20 minutes because they just weren’t sure it was right.
So I’ll ask you, who do you want to have listening? Is the silent 40% part of your audience? If it is, we should be able to estimate how much engagement you’ll see based on the other active personality segments. If you know that the majority of your audience is seeing your stuff, they are just not commenting, would you be compelled to change your message at all? Would it make you feel just a little bit better about pushing the publish button?
All effective marketing pieces need to follow a common formula, whether the piece is an email, postcard, web page, coupon, radio or TV ad, brochure, flyer, verbal presentation or anything else that is used to promote your business and gain customers.