The word engagement is thrown around a lot in social media as a way of describing what people should do. In a recent post, I discussed how Pepsico handled a PR crisis by being as proactive as possible in contacting people who were upset by an ad they put out. That's a good practice to do for handling crisis situations. However, its also worthwhile to consider what kind of social media behaviors you should be doing in general, in order to effectively "engage" your audience.
When I think about engagement in social media, I think of it as an activity where a person is purposefully choosing to interact with other people. S/he is commenting on other people's news and responding to comments made on his/her news. S/he is actively interested in participating in the online community and is also actively interested in helping others out.
But how many people or businesses really do that? I'll admit that some days I am more active than others, but each day I try to leave comments on my networks and respond to people. I think of social networking as similar to in-person networking. You've got to show up enough in people's lives for them to know you exist and want to find out more about you. This means you need to be consistent in your activities and you need to show interest in them.
The real measurement of engagement is partially found in website visits and clicks, but equally found in conversations joined, comments responded to, and also in the sentiments people express about your business or yourself. As such what needs to be factored into engagement is the success of building relationships and how people consequently promote that relationship with their friends and family and overall network.
The social aspects of social media can never be emphasized enough. Trying to get website traffic doesn't mean much if you don't provide a reason for people to care and chances are that what you think they should care about is exactly what they don't care about. You can't really learn what they care about until you start to interact with them as people as opposed to prospects. Joining in the conversation will do more for your marketing than just posting links to your website. People have learned to ignore or skip past what isn't relevant. They want to know how you can help them as well as whether you really care about them. Make no mistake, you do need to care about them if you want them to interact with you. Engagement then really means developing relationships, sustaining them, and consequently creating an environment where people can trust you enough to want to do business with you.