Engagement is a buzz word that’s gaining popularity as of late. I see it used a lot across various blogs and I use it myself. When you’re talking about any kind of social media marketing there has to be a focus on engagement in order for your strategy to gain traction.

The question is, how many people are actually doing something with the message that you’re sending? What kind of results are you seeing with your social media marketing?

How do you really know you’re engaging people?

When it comes to social media marketing, companies deal with a lot of metrics trying to gauge the return on investment and make sense of the entire system. The most important measurement is discovering how well you’re engaging your prospects. This directly shows the number of people who actually held enough interest in your content to follow through into some kind of action.

Popular tools for tracking engagement are Biz360, Tweeteffect and Radian6.

You can get more specific with the various networks however, and start finding ways to look into the actions of users to reveal performance and engagement indicators that you can track.

Twitter: Tally the number of link clickthroughs (check bit.ly or other URL shortener for your stats), total retweet counts across the network and determine how many times your hashtag was used. Across those tables, look at the number of people who were individually responsible for all the activity. This can also help you determine the path through which your information travels – is it hitting a broader network or filtering down through the follower chain of a single individual?

Facebook: Like Twitter, you can use stat pages from your own domain or via URL shortener sites to determine the total number of unique link clicks from within your Facebook account. Track the number of times the information was shared across your network and break this down to see how many unique people generated the activity. If it’s relevant to your overall social media marketing campaign, you can look into other wall posts and discussion threads to find out if additional buzz is being generated.

YouTube: YouTube is a unique system simply because it’s far easier to track the engagement. Viewers are much more likely to vote and comment here. Indicators for engagement start with the number of comments, overall ratings and rating count, how many times the video has been shared, total count of new subscribers and of course any video responses the video might have.

Your Blog: This one is a little trickier, because a good blog usually asks about a dozen things from the reader. That’s why a call to action is hard to implement. We often want each reader to do multiple things:
• Read
• Comment
• Rate
• Opt-in
• Bookmark
• Retweet/Share
• Link to the blog

For total engagement you could measure all of these stats together to determine how effective your social media marketing is overall or measure them individually (or in small groups) depending on the campaign you’re running and the results you seek.

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