Social media engagement is the worst metric you can use
It's easy to measure but very hard to show any tangible results
This week’s Dispash is a bit later than usual. Children, exercise, videos of dogs all took priority. The latter probably generated a lot of engagement. To quote The Princess Bride, you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Onwards
Business results 0% social media engagement 100%
Work in any marketing team and you’ll inevitably hear the word engagement thrown around, quite often with regard to social media activity. Can it be measured? Absolutely. What does it mean? That’s a little harder.
Back in the mid-late 2000s when social media roles started becoming common in companies and agencies quickly expanded to offer social media as a key component of marketing activity, there where two problems: how do we measure this and why are we measuring this?
It’s a conversation I and others who’d somehow fallen into a career in social spent long periods of time discussing in various pubs and bars at assorted social specialist meetups.
To businesses who were looking for return on investing in social - and this was the time before Facebook had properly turned on advertising and Words With Friends was part of the daily routine - the lack of anything tangible to report back on was a potential problem, and perhaps went some way to explain why social was met with scepticism from some quarters.
This is why engagement ended up as a dominant metric in the early days of social - and continues to appear as a KPI on agency and internal reporting. It’s easily measurable, sits at the heart of what makes social media, well, social, and implies some level of importance. Having people engaging with your brand had to be a good thing, sure, even if it was hard to say why.
It also goes some way to explain why PR agencies tended to grasp organic social media a little better in the early days, as the end goal of both disciplines at this point were quite closely aligned, and PR is one part of marketing that, done well, amplifies conversations.
We’re now over 15 years since social media specific roles became A Thing. In that time, social media has changed beyond all recognition. It’s now one of the most dominant advertising networks in the world, sits at the centre of most ecommerce journeys, has a problem with bots and fake profiles, and has been implicated in a genocide and attempts to overthrow democracy. Social in 2022 is not social in 2007.
Engagement’s role in 2022 is much diminished
Engagement still sits at the heart of lot of reporting, proposed KPIs, and even strategies (I use that word in the loosest possible sense). For a metric that was key to early successes with organic virality, it occupies a curious place in the marcomms mix. Many brands still use social media as click bait, designed to chase an extra sugar hit of mildly increased reach and a lot of engagement.
It may have evolved from the tactical “tag a mate” but pick a handful of brands across Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok, especially in the FMCG space, attempt to reverse engineer the strategy and you’ll probably end up back at engagement. The what behind the execution is clear. The strategic ‘why’ and the benefits engagement brings a brand is a lot less clear.
There are some industries where engagement as a key metric still makes a degree of sense. These are generally where the primary product being sold trades on attention, such as film, TV, sport and potentially tourism.
And there are platforms, primarily TikTok and, to a lesser extent, LinkedIn, where the algorithmic reward of generating engagement makes it slightly more worthwhile to invest in delivering this particular KPI.
But it’s very rare, or very risky, for a strategy to depend on social engagement entirely for its success. Weetabix may have gone viral with a Tweet about mixing their breakfast cereal with baked beans, but this was more of a calculated attempt to earn column inches for PR than it was about social engagement.
For every Weetabix, there’s a thousand social media managers pumping out content on a daily basis that struggles to get into triple figures of engaged users. Global FMCG brands where the market size is most of the adult population are unlikely to see their sales impacted by a few hundred Instagram likes.
Les Binet and Peter Field’s Media In Focus reinforces this. One featured effectiveness case study for Walls’ ice cream show that social media accounted for nearly half the revenue generated from their Classics range, but 99% of this attribution came from paid not organic. Impressions were more important that engagement.
Jerry Daykin, who was working for Mondelez during Oreo’s Super Bowl Dunk In The Dark moment, backs this up. Daykin notes that a later less celebrated Oreo campaign around the solar eclipse had more impact due to the amplification through paid media.
Brand loyalty is not the same thing as a profitable brand
Another argument for engagement is that it generates or enhances brand loyalty. Generate repeated engagements with your loyal customer base and they’ll buy even more.
It’s a seductive proposition, especially for marketers who live and breathe their brand every day. Who wouldn’t want consumers to engage with their social profiles every day?
But as well as being seductive, it’s also a dangerous line of thought, and potentially a costly one as well. The reason? Targeting existing loyal customers is far less effective than targeting the category as a whole.
Binet and Field’s Media In Focus notes that loyalty campaigns will target only a small amount of the total market, reducing the potential effectiveness. To quote: “It is much harder to get somebody to increase their consumption of the project or pay more for it, than it is to get them to try another brand.”
Which is to say that brand loyalists and superfans like Coca Cola lover Dan Thielmann can only consume so much of the product. Dan is likely to already buy as much Coke as he can physically consume. Other heavy buyers would already buy the drink anyway with only small mental nudges needed, if at all.
So yes, engaging content helps consumers remember that your brand exists, or potentially has a new SKU or feature. Spending hours creating exclusive content or memes may raise a few smiles from followers, but it won’t increase profits as much as convincing light category buyers to buy more.
It’s a mistake I made the first time I worked with an FMCG client. The content and tactics were spot on to appeal to brand loyalists. Many of them became vocal advocates on social media, but largely to other vocal advocates of the brand, and the same names cropped up every week in the engagement reports.
It’s possible these loyalists may have ended up adding an extra couple of items to their basket each week, but getting more light buyers to try or increase their purchases would have done more to claw back market share. The media agency realised this. We (to my shame and frustration today) were too busy creating content and chasing engagement to notice.
Categories outside of FMCG may behave slightly differently and the aim may be slightly different - consideration or even retention in B2B for example - but prioritising engagement over other metrics is the least likely path to long-term success (although on some platforms it may provide a significant short-term boost. I’d love somebody to study the long term brand effects of products that go viral through #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt).
[A note: if you’d like to go into this in more depth, read How Brands Grow and pay particular attention to the chapters around the Buyer Moderation Law and the NBD Dirichlet Model. The Marketing Society have a good ‘in’ to this topic.]
And a final word of warning: just because engagement itself is measurable, it doesn’t mean you’re measuring the right form of engagement.
One brand I consulted on in the home renovation industry was seeing very positive engagement numbers through some exceptionally lustful property images on Instagram.
But the profile of those who were engaging with the imagery was so far away from the brand’s target audience that it was extremely unlikely they would ever buy the product, which wasn’t always obvious from the posts.
Unlike the high earning homeowners who wanted to invest in a stunning renovation, the majority of engagement was coming from people in their early 20s who were unlikely to buy a property, let alone spend eye-watering sums of money renovating it.
Long term brand building efforts form the bedrock of any good strategy. Repeated engagement from an audience that, at best, was 15 years away from being able to afford the product, was taking the very long view. Engagement 1 Profits 0.
What has The Romans social media ever done for us?
So, if engagement on social media rarely aligns to strategic goals, is inferior to market penetration, and has little impact on purchase, what does it do?
On a very basic level, it can drive down advertising costs slightly. CPMs should drop with more engagements, as platforms reward users who stick around for longer and advertising who can make them stick. It’s not really the main metric to chase but it can help with margins.
Brand awareness and brand saliency is potentially a safer bet. LinkedIn does this particularly well when it shows which of your connections like a specific advertiser. Beating the algorithm on platforms set up to amplify organic can help with mental availability. But then so does paid media. And so does PR.
Finally, while loyalists themselves may not be the best path towards future growth, they can guide you how to get there. Same with people who absolutely despise you and your product.
Social listening’s greatest asset is the amount of qualitative data it throws up, if you know where to dig. [Customer service is also useful insofar as its good to meet the customer in their chosen channel. It’s almost certainly more valuable than a low reach organic piece of content.]
These days I’m more inclined to think of branded organic social as the online equivalent of a shop storefront. You walk past it, you brain vaguely registers it, and very occasionally you might check the profile to make sure the lights are still on. It can help signpost a larger campaign with the equivalent of digital window dressing. And it doesn’t hurt to keep up a presence.
One final caveat. This isn’t the same for every brand in every category. Depending on the strategy, a B2B brand may place a big tactical bet on organic across TikTok and YouTube. An FMCG may have worked out a way to increase reach organically beyond just loyalists.
But these are all tactics. The minute your strategy rests on the premise of engagement, you’re probably in trouble.
The creative cost of social media engagement
Engagement can be a massive budget suck. Social specialist Chris Nee makes a similar point to the above rather more eloquently than me. The majority of people who take a positive business action aren’t like to spend their time replying to brands on social media. LINK.
Branded virtue signalling
Somebody has built a bot that searches the UK government’s database of gendered pay disparity - every time a brand Tweets about International Women’s Day, the bot Tweets their pay gap back at them. Simple, creative and effective. LINK.
Building a big brand on a small budget
No recollection of who or where this was originally shared, but I found this deck lurking amongst one of my many open tabs. It’s an excellent summary of the issue that many brands who were born from performance advertising face as they try to scale. Apple’s privacy changes are likely to be problematic for many of these companies as the cost of customer acquisition gets too high. This is a blueprint for one way to escape the $CAC Valley of Death. LINK.
Advertising is out of touch with reality part 258
A report from The Sutton Trust and The Bridge Group in the UK notes that only 12% of the creative industry workforce comes from a lower socio-economic background versus the national average of 30%. When everybody comes from a similar background, you veer towards homogenous thinking, which may account for why a lot of advertising looks so similar. File under really must do better. LINK.
Collaboration overload
On one hand, Covid lockdowns forced companies to adapt to remote working in a way that was long overdue. On the other, it exacerbated meeting and collaboration overload. It’s often the high performers who struggle with this. Flexible working has made working life better in some aspects, but no commute also makes it easier to work longer and not have a hard stop that allows people to switch off mentally. As ever, the answer as to who benefits most is probably management consultants. LINK.
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Playing us out this week: Pretenders - Hymn To Her. Chrissie Hynde is quite probably one of the coolest human beings ever to walk this earth.