A social media presence without any engagement - whether as an individual or a brand - is like having a car without tyres. Everything's in place, the engine's revving, you're changing gears but you never get anywhere.
We're now sufficiently far along in our social media culture to be able to look back and see just what works and what doesn't - and more importantly, ascertain the reasons why. It doesn't matter if the content you're sharing is original or it's a curated post which you're propagating along your social network of contacts, the material that consistently does well and generates engagement adheres to five very specific requirements, each of which reflects something greater.
They are as follows:
Appeal
Content that accurately reflects audience mood and interests and has the right tone and aspirational direction tends to resonate with its readership at a deeper level. This leads to greater sharing to their social networks.
Social Proof
The psychological term for social proof is "informational social influence" and it's been around ever since there have been people who were grouped into distinct groups, governed by a collective identity and identified by a widely accepted creed. Content that's been widely re-shared already comes with a crowd-sourced stamp of approval which lowers the barriers to more people re-sharing it. This makes popular content become even more popular.
Connection
The content needs to resonate. This requires a clear understanding of the audience, what's important to them and where that's addressed or referenced in the content that you're sharing. This is a humanization exercise. Connection provides any brand, marketer or organization with the opportunity to say "Hey, I'm just like you" and actually mean it.
Feeling
We are, unfortunately, irrational beings. We're driven by emotion so much of the time that when we're faced with a rational train of thought, we sometimes don't even recognize it. This is why marketing uses emotional triggers and why politicians appeal to our instincts rather than lay out detailed policies that make sense when courting our votes. Social media's no exception. Content that fails to make us feel anything leaves us indifferent. Indifference is not the kind of feeling any marketer or brand ever looks for.
Values
Content is a vehicle. Hidden within it, is a subtle code that carries our sense of values, our priorities in the world and how we see ourselves within it. While those who see it may not analyze it the way we're doing here, they are nonetheless really good at decoding what it represents and deciding whether it's aligned with what they consider to be important to them or not.
It all seems simple enough, so why aren't more people, companies and brands doing it this way? Why is engagement still an issue? Why do we, when we have to kinda' hide failure on that front, revert back to the meaninglessness of counting Facebook Likes and Google Plus +1s?
The secret, if we can call it that, lies in something simple: feeling. Emotion. There is a disconnect in marketing where analytics is used to gauge audience behavior, determine best times to post a piece of content and decide on the best channel to use to reach a particular 'generation'. All of this is cognitive in nature, logical and analytical when the reason consumers connect with a person, a company or a brand and decide to form a bond with them is always affective.
Marketing doesn't do affective well (unless it's to apply emotional triggers at the point of sale) because emotion tends to cloud judgement. Muddy campaigns. Or so we think. What emotion really does is it strips bare the usual dressing of thin marketing. It reveals the passion (or lack of) hiding underneath. It shows the people behind the brand at their most vulnerable. It sends a loud, unambiguous message that says: "We are passionate about what we do and we hope you like it". For a company or a brand to do that it needs to establish real trust amongst its people first, and then trust that the audience that they're addressing will understand and respond.
We are not quite there yet. But as the social media platforms mature and their membership base grows more and more savvy with the tricks of the trade used by marketers, what will work will be what's always worked: Being real.
And that's something that's hard to fake.