Speaker 1:
I want you to think about engagement more broadly. I also want you to realize that even engagement on social posts varies dramatically these days. So there’s a macro thing happening and then a micro thing and I’ll address both. So the macro thing that we see happening with engagement is that more and more decisions get made in dark social. And I’ve talked about this for years. Dark social is one of these fascinating phenomenas where people don’t raise their hand in public. They don’t leave comments. They consume information. In fact, in my book, The Zen of Social Media Marketing, I talked about how consumption plus time turns someone into a customer or a client. And so that engagement, that consumption often happens passively. And now what’s happened is people share things in Slack channels, in LinkedIn messages, in Reddit chats. You’re watching this video right now.
Speaker 1:
People consume content all the time, text messages. So this consumption is very much happening. This sharing is happening, but you can’t see it, right? So just because someone doesn’t leave a comment on this video doesn’t mean that they didn’t watch it, that they didn’t engage, they weren’t influenced by it. And so that’s kind of what’s happening on the macro level as this dark social, where people are trading information, just not publicly available for you to see. Now, privately, I guess the more micro level, what’s happening is there’s even generational differences. Where what you see with Gen Z and to some level, even millennials, is that you see more engagement. They’ll ask questions, there’s more public discourse, but what you often find in Gen X, baby boomers, even the Silent Generation is that they’re not leaving comments. They’re more wallflower type engagement, but that doesn’t mean they’re not engaging.
Speaker 1:
This is also true for different industries. A lot of times what you see in tech or SaaS or healthcare, especially bigger ticket items is you don’t see a lot of people publicly engaging with the content saying, “Boy, that was a great blog post,” or “Hey, that really helped me make this decision. Thanks.” You don’t see that, but that’s definitely happening behind the scenes. So part of it is learning to accept that a lot of this is happening behind the scenes and will continue to happen behind the scenes. But just because it’s happening behind the scenes, doesn’t mean that it’s any less valuable or any less important.
Speaker 1:
If anything, influences very much the new currency, engagement is key and is happening, but just because you can’t see, it doesn’t mean it’s not taking place. I urge you to shun metrics like click-through rates or put them in their place, and really look at metrics like share voice that give you a much better sense of what your place is in the marketplace and how much market share you have. And inevitably, if you work on increasing your share voice through earned media, through content, through creating things that your audience actually wants, your market share will inevitably go up. So that’s my take on engagement and how the world continues to change.
