All social media content is judged based on a somewhat nebulous concept known as “engagement.” Hypothetically, it’s a measure of how much your followers are interested in the things you post on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In practice, engagement can be harder to pin down.
One way for a business to judge engagement is to create a formula that aggregates things like shares, comments and likes into a single metric. This allows you to track engagement with a broad, easy-to-read measurement. Once in place, it lets you graph and compare the results of different content, which can be very helpful in choosing what people respond to the most. For example, perhaps you discover that videos score higher than photos of products. Now you know how to increase the reach of your posts.
No matter how you gauge the success of your social media content, here’s a tip for getting some traction: recruit your employees. I’m not in favor of compelling your team to follow the company’s social media accounts, but there isn’t anything wrong with asking. Plus, if you give everybody in the company a chance to watch your engagement metric, you can make success into a goal for everyone. For instance, you might present a message like this to employees “Like and share our post, and let’s see if we can get our engagement number up to 100!” You could even buy everybody Dairy Queen if they reach certain milestones (ice cream is very motivating).
It’s easier to improve engagement if you have a metric to observe. Consider making it one of the indicators that you keep an eye on, and soon you’ll be able to answer “is my content engaging?” with some certainty. Best of all, you’ll have clues about how to make it better.
