Rethinking social media engagement

The dichotomy of social media engagement is that a plurality of posts that get good engagement are terrible for converting sales, and posts that are great at converting are terrible for engagement.

This is not true every time, but 60-70% of the time, this will bear out.

It happens less when you are showcasing art, more when you are running Kickstarters or other launches, and way more if you are just posting a link instead of an image.

You might say “well that means 30-40% of the time it works, so I should keep doing it”, but when you run a company at scale, it means you’ll be losing more often than you win, and that’s not a good way to run a business.

Engagement is great for the social media network, but it’s useless for running a business, at least during a launch, which is when most product-based businesses care about making money.

Yes, it’s nice to engage with people, post stupid memes, and get reacts, but social media engagement is a hollow metric at the end of the day, because it, by factor of the above statement, is a horrible way to judge sales.

There is value in engagement because it builds empathy, trust, and likeability with your audience. I love Facebook for audience engagement, but I absolutely do not expect it to be a sales driver unless I pay for ads.

I love engaging with my audience and I’m thrilled to do it, but if you judge your posts by REACTIONS, especially SALES POSTS, you’re going to be sorely disappointed by the results.

Posts that CONVERT get AWFUL engagement. People that click rarely also engage, because they have ALREADY clicked off the site.

They are going to buy, and so there is no need for them to click the react button.

People perform one action. So, if they are engaging, they are not clicking, and vice versa. The reason sales posts get good reaction is that people run then into the ground with ads and by sheer volume of exposure they get a lot of reactions, not because they are great at organic engagement.

When you are running ads, you can even tell Facebook you are looking for engagement, clicks, or conversions, and it will target different people depending on what you choose, because engagers are, generally, NOT buyers.

Ironically, this plays into the algorithm perfectly, because it judges success on reactions.

Reactions mean people stay on the social network, and staying on-site is essential for a social media company’s market capitalization.

They want to make it very difficult to get off the platform unless you pay for it.

Thus, posts that CONVERT do not matter to the algorithm, because they do not get reactions, and are thus naturally suppressed, forcing you to buy advertising to promote it.

Thus increasing a company’s revenue, and valuation. Unfortunately, most people equate reactions to sales, and factor in the wrong things into their plan, meaning that their campaigns are doomed before they begin.