Why Social Media Engagement Numbers Suck (And What We Should Really Worry About)

It’s not really a new topic, but it keeps cropping up.

Social media “engagement” numbers and “conversations” just aren’t living up to expectations. This recent article on VentureBeat focuses on Facebook’s dwindling organic reach and paltry commenting and sharing activity, citing some research from Forrester that says that engagement is pretty abysmal overall for big brands (this is important, more on this later).

What happens in the wake of this kind of discussion?

The battle cry becomes “social media isn’t worth the investment”, littered with everything from the I-told-you-this-was-stupid crowd to the palpably deflated sighs from social’s biggest evangelists wondering how in the heck they’re going to justify their budgets next year.

What’s going wrong here?

In a word: perspective.

Facebook Is Not The Gospel

Facebook has the most visible profile, sure.

But we have got to stop conflating Facebook with “social”. Facebook is one site, with one set of capabilities and its own limitations, that is itself a for-profit business interested in creating a sustainable revenue model. That means capturing eyeballs and audience so they can serve ads. The end.

That is far from the complete picture of what “social” is or means in context of business impact. If you look at it that way, no wonder it’s all “social isn’t working”. Of course it isn’t. Because Facebook didn’t design itself to serve our needs and desires for more open, accessible conversations with companies. They are not here to realize the potential of bringing the customer closer to the business. They are here to make money based on their own model (which is decidedly not social, by the by, but that a post for a different day).

Let’s take a step back here and revisit social in terms of a concept instead of a tool.

Social Is All About Providing Access.

Forget all about Facebook or Twitter or any specific “social network” for a minute and think about what social means in practice.

To most of us who are marketing and communication types, the idea of being “social” with our customers means bringing them closer to the company and giving them better, more streamlined access to two things:

1. The information and people they need to create a strong, positive buying experience with a company
2. Other customers or community members that can relate to their buying needs.

We’re trying to reduce friction in communication, raise the level of trust between our customers and our organization, and reward our community, advocates, and customers with an experience that surpasses their expectations.

Does that scan okay so far?

Good.

But if that’s the case, social is all about the philosophy and practice of achieving those things, no matter what the mechanism.

I can make phone calls more social by having people answer phones instead of robots. I can make email more social by personalizing it and relentlessly tweaking buying paths and behaviors to get people the information they need, when they need it, in a way that’s useful and perhaps even entertaining. Hell, I can make an *analog* shareholders meeting more social by offering opportunities for more open dialog, feedback, discussion and access to executives.

Being “social” has to do with behavior, not technology.

But What About Social Networks, Smart Girl?

The networks are the means, not the end. And there will always be another one.

To go back to my example, you don’t need a LinkedIn to have a network. The technology might make the network easier to access, move within and communicate with, but it’s not the network itself. You already have that, and you could build it in a number of other ways. LinkedIn simply changes (and arguably improves) the mechanics.

Your neighborhood is a network. Your staff is a network. Your fellow moms, golf nerds, gearheads or gamers are networks too. The networks of humans already exist. The technology is a layer that makes those relationships much easier to work with, easier to tap, easier to visualize, extend and certainly to find through its unique capabilities.

If, at some point, that technology mode works at odds with the aim and purpose of the network of humans, that doesn’t mean the idea of networks and communication and access are broken. It just means that you don’t have the perfect tool in your hands to enable that.

What social networks did for us in business is expose in a very tangible way how much we want our customer experiences to be much more personal overall.

That does not mean that those relationships and experiences have to be directly between our company and those customers, either. Which is where we’ve got our perspective all sorts of jacked up.

Let’s Get Our Expectations Straight.

Here’s what I think we have to do to reset our perspective about “social” and its role in business. Consider it my mini-manifesto for the moment.

1. We need to realize that customer experience is multi-dimensional. The purchase experience needs to be as customer-friendly as possible. The customer service experience needs to be responsive, friendly and timely. And the community experience needs to be accessible and personal. Those are all different moments, but they’re all helped by having a more social philosophy in place for how we do what we do.

2. We must stop assuming that customers’ relationships need to be with our brand in order to have value. It’s entirely possible that while they may not want a “relationship” with the brand that makes their steak sauce, they might very well appreciate a community of backyard grilling enthusiasts for which the company serves as a sort of connectors. Customers can have relationships that are around our brand without being with our brand, and yet our organization is still serving a critical and unique role.

3. Even if our customers don’t want a “relationship” with us in terms of having extended conversations or personal interactions on a regular basis about toothpaste, they do still appreciate clear communication, accessible and friendly help, and a peek behind the curtain to see the culture of that company and what they care about. Those are unequivocally “social” behaviors that may or may not have anything functional to do with a mainstream social network, ever.

4. We must stop the navel-gazing “content” machine that assumes that our customers want Vine videos about dental floss because that’s what we’re charged with selling. Content only works when you’re willing to create something that’s useful for your customer and relevant to your company without your product ever appearing in the discussion. Why this is so hard for us to get our heads around I’m not so sure, but I know that there is a dearth of really interesting media and material out there that doesn’t just smack of a glorified advertisement or product placement. We have to stop bandwagon jumping and creating painfully mediocre “stuff” just to say we’re “content marketing”. And we wonder why no one ‘engages’? Please.

5. The benchmarks for social success must stop being about clicks and activity. We created this monster ourselves by glomming onto the idea that our fans, followers, and “likes” somehow equate something more significant than “hey, yeah I’ve heard of that company and mostly like what they create at this microscopic moment in time.”

6. The benchmarks for social success must start being holistically embedded in our customer success measurements. If we behave in a more personal, accessible way in everything we do, do people buy more? Do they buy more often? Do they recommend and refer us? Do they advocate on our behalf? Do they otherwise indicate that they like us, whether they “comment” or not? Do they stick with us even if we raise our prices, hit a production glitch, or make a mistake? Are they happy and do they care if we go away tomorrow?

7. We must honor the idea that ‘engagement’ comes in many forms, most much more subtle and nuanced than what we can accurately observe on a Facebook page. Our goal is to connect with our customers and serve them better than anyone else. And depending on their personality, age, interests and profile coupled with the nature of our business, community, and the complexity of our customers’ buying process and influences, our successful integration of social behavior may or may not be observed on an online social network.

8. We must realize that true ‘social success’ is significantly more determined by how well we’ve shaped our culture and operations to be good to our customers, rewarding for our employees, and capable of creating great products and services.

9. If the only benchmark for worth in business strategy is what “works” for the top 50 global brands, there is an entire international marketplace of everyone but those businesses that has been doing it wrong for over a century. Our obsession with blue-chip case studies as a blueprint must end.

10. We have to accept that no, business has not always been social. It’s been industrially-driven, process-driven, efficiency-driven, and it’s been successful that way. But expectations have shifted, our consumer culture is changing, our values are being shaped differently than they once were. Social business is a concept that is helping us return to the idea of a company driven by customer experience and community.

11. Finally, we must believe that, in order to accomplish that kind of shift in the way we work, we must be willing to look deeper than at one or two social networks du jour in order to engineer and realize that change. The kind of change that is seen over a pattern of years, not months.

It’s Up To You, Really.

If you want to consider “social” as just a set of tools in a marketing toolbox that are vehicles for advertising content, pay-per-click revenue and site traffic numbers, that’s totally fine. In which case yes, the lofty expectations you have for the magic of social media are likely to get dashed on the rocks of the mighty internet sea. You’ll have to put social in the box you’ve created for it, and measure it accordingly. It may or may not be worth your time.

If, instead, you consider “social” as a set of behaviors and philosophies that govern how and why you work the way you do in order to create a truly exceptional experience for the people that buy and use your products and services, then we have a different conversation brewing entirely.

And you’ll see why saying that “social doesn’t work” in terms of what you see or don’t in a silly Facebook news feed is shallow and empty at best.

Can we please raise the bar, here? Can we break our attention deficit long enough to raise our eyes to the horizon instead of the grains of sand beneath our feet?

I still believe that “social” has the power to transform business for an entire generation. But my definition is surely more broad, deep and complex than what you can touch with an analytics report alone. And it’s nothing to do with whether someone clicks “like” on my clever infographic.

Maybe I’m crazy. But that’s the only thing that’s ever really changed anything anyway.

The audacity to demand something more.