Why is Social Engagement so Important?

In the modern age of marketing, social media is a truly dominant force—its impact has been felt across industries and markets, and continues to be one of the driving forces of business growth. However, it’s not enough to simply create a page for your business and irregularly update it with content. In order to truly reap the lucrative rewards of an effective social media presence, it’s critical that you spark genuine engagement among your following. Before we can get there, we need to understand exactly what social media engagement is and why it’s so important to your online marketing efforts—today’s article is going to explore both of these areas to help you to guide your subsequent engagement-building efforts.

A Quick Dive Into Social Media Engagement

Take a quick look at any guides pertaining to social media marketing, and you’ll quickly notice how often marketers will extoll the virtues of high engagement rates. Unfortunately, they often do little to explain precisely what that metric is or what it’s even tracking. Essentially, engagement is just a term used by marketers in order to define the conversation that occurs around your brand. In a social media context, a conversation does not necessarily have to mean dialogue, either. Hashtags, retweets, and more all count to the “engagement” generated by your posts.

Traditionally, marketing went only in one direction. This meant that when a television commercial would air, businesses would have to hope that it had the intended effect on its intended audiences—that is, a greater number of sales or leads. When it comes to digital marketing, however, the flow of conversation now flows in both directions. Companies can publish content and get immediate feedback as to its effectiveness, impact, and longevity. This not only allows for improved marketing refinement but also enables marketers in question to look past simple sales numbers and track a much wider variety of underlying metrics. For example, a campaign may not have delivered the immediate bump in sales that you were initially expecting, but if it sparked genuine, positive discussion across the social media sphere, then you can expect the campaign to pay dividends over longer periods of time thanks to the lasting impact it had in the minds of your target consumers. Ultimately, social media engagement is looking at two things—how often consumers are interacting with your brand, and the manner in which they choose to do so. Whether it’s a through a passing retweet or a multi-comment discussion thread discussing your latest products, high levels of engagement are at the root of an effective online marketing campaign.

Striving for High Engagement Rates

Now that we know more about what social media engagement is, we can take a closer look at what makes it so important to your marketing efforts. Strong social engagement boils down to three main overarching advantages:

It lends credence to your marketing. With strong engagement, you’re offering potential consumers proof that you can live up to any and all claims made in your marketing materials. After all, lots of discussion, many likes, multiple shares, and positive comments act as highly visible endorsements of the products or services that you offer, helping to drive subsequent conversions all on their own.

It establishes your presence. More so than anything else, customers are increasingly turning to social media for product recommendations and reviews as opposed to company-centric advertising efforts. This is because posts published across these channels are viewed as more authentic and trustworthy, since endorsements are often coming from individuals that belong to the social circle of the prospective consumer. As engagement grows, so too does the visibility of your marketing—and your brand—greatly expanding the reach and influence of your business in an organic way.

It allows for easier market penetration. Aside from a few outliers, the social media landscape is dominated by just a few industry titans that are accessible on a global scale. Through shares, likes, and comments made on these influential channels, your content can quickly spread throughout the world, drastically increasing the awareness of your brand. When it comes time to expand to these new regions, your business can capitalise on this initial awareness to find much quicker success, rather than try to build an attention-grabbing—and costly—awareness campaign right from the ground up.

Social engagement is critical for building a strong online presence, but it’s important that you understand precisely why before putting together a plan of action to drive improvement. We’ve given you a brief rundown of how and why engagement matters to your marketing endeavours, but it’s critical that you understand the cascading benefits that it can offer—engagement can augment all of your future campaigns, so the earlier that you start building it, the better.