Interaction, Engagement, Influence
The goal of any sales and promotion effort centers around getting people to buy the product or service. Social media focuses on interaction and engagement as proxies – or sometimes pre-requisites – for influence (what the literature calls authority).
You see it when agents and publishers require writers to participate in social media channels, then judge them on how many friends or follows they have. They require a certain level of likes and comments to prove that the writer has a sufficiently large following to be worth investing in.
The problems become obvious when you start analyzing what each of those three terms mean.
Interaction consists of the easiest form of response. It's the knee-jerk “like” or “re-tweet” or “boost.” A reader saw the message and blessed it, likely without even remembering they did it a minute later. This can give the message's author a nice warm feeling but it doesn't really mean the post had any effect on the reader. They didn't need to think about the response.
Engagement takes things to the next level. A reply to any social media posting requires the reader to process the message at a deeper level in order to compose a response – even the most shallow or trite one. That deeper level of processing makes engagement something different from interaction.
But the goal is not to garner either interaction or engagement. The goal is to get the reader to react positively to your message.
Maybe you want them to buy your book. Maybe you just want them to sign up for your newsletter. Whatever action you want them to take needs to go beyond the simple “talk to me” responses typified by interaction and engagement.
But that action doesn't happen on social media. It happens in your newsletter sign-up or the book's storefront. Your success isn't measured by likes or replies, but rather new sign-ups or sales.
Worse, those actions don't correspond to the observed instances of interaction and engagement.
Sure, some of those people like your posts and chat with you, but the largest component of any audience consists of the people you never heard from. They're the lurkers who operate from the shadows or perhaps never look at social media at all.
Lurkers are the real audience for social media marketing. For every person who follows, friends, and likes you, there can be a hundred you never know about. Your voice becomes amplified beyond what you can see from the stage and into the dark recesses of the balcony.
You might see them signing up for your newsletter but unless you sell books on your own site, you'll never know who bought your book. Was it somebody who follows you on social media? Or somebody who heard about it by observing a conversation?
Maybe it's just a person who bought it because their friend recommended it to them.
You don't know. You can't know.
Which is why chasing interaction and engagement can be a frustrating and – sometimes – pointless activity.
While having them is nice, what you really need is influence.