Many marketing teams struggle to prove social media’s worth to the c-suite because there is no way to truly measure the impact of it. Impressions don’t necessarily lead to purchases, and customer engagement can be both positive and negative. It’s difficult to measure — and for a group of people who rely heavily on numbers and data to make decisions, it’s a gray area they aren’t usually willing to dive into.
But businesses can’t pay the bills with engagement. Leads, clients and sales not engagement are the currency of business. Engagement is not a goal, only a tactic to produce measurable business results. In addition to responsive communication, brands and businesses can begin to build relationships with their customers beyond those that happen during normal transactions. These relationships are what keep customers coming back, increasing both loyalty and retention. If those customers become advocates and increase your word of mouth presence, you'll start seeing amazing returns. Constantly pushing a commerce message limits the relationship the brand has with customers. If the brand is only providing a one-way conversation by asking for users to purchase, consumers will lose interest and content will lose effectiveness. By posting informative and engagement posts, the brand offers value to the customer, staying top of mind and building a loyal relationship. The first step is getting people to simply like you, whether on Facebook, by word of mouth, or however. The people who like you are consistently having their expectations met. This typically feels transactional with a low level of engagement, though there's certainly nothing wrong with that. Like any other business activity, engagement entails costs and resources that must be balanced against results. The key to success is determining how engagement will help you reach your business goals. A Social-bakers study concludes the number of social interactions with a company’s social media posts correlates to the number of visits to the company’s website. In simple terms: when social interactions go up, website traffic goes up.
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| THE VALUE OF SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT |
Brands can also benefit from proactive social engagement, or seeking content to engage beyond their own notification screens. Brands can monitor social media for brand mentions, keywords and questions to find customer service and lead generation opportunities, sometimes at the expense of a competitor that isn’t monitoring as closely. That type of social media engagement has value. But getting and counting “likes” and other types of vanity engagement has little business benefit.
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