Prologue

Social media engagement (SME) is the “stuff that happens” during your social media marketing campaigns. SME is an essential part of social media marketing. If you don’t connect with others in social networks — and if they don’t respond to you — you don’t have engagement. Without engagement, you’re simply broadcasting messages that fall on deaf ears. Nobody wants that to happen, right?

In this blog, we help you start thinking about SME, including the benefits of engaging with customers. We outline who participates in SME. Hint: It isn’t just you. We also introduce concepts that explain how SME happens — or how it should happen — if you’re using best practices.

If you’re being thoughtful about the way you communicate with — and connect with — others online, you’ll have greater success in reaching customers via SME. But first you need to understand what it is, how it works, and what your role is in making it happen.

Seeking the Benefits of Social Media Engagement

When will it ever end? Technology changes constantly and so quickly that it feels like the moment you gain a new skill or figure out how to use a new online tool, everything changes again and your newly acquired skills seem obsolete. Let’s face it: Social media engagement seems to change daily.

Simply put, social media engagement (often abbreviated as SME) is the process by which online communications and the content you post online help you build connections with other people within online communities. Social media engagement involves the use of the tools of social media — social networks, for example — to build relationships with others that, ideally, result in some kind of reaction, interaction, or action.

You may be wondering why you should consider using SME. Maybe you’re satisfied with your current marketing strategies that involve concrete numbers and set dollar amounts. Maybe you’re buying advertising in traditional media such as print, television, or radio and even though you’ve witnessed its declining effectiveness over the years, it’s what you know.

Maybe you’re committed to advertising online with banner ads, skyscraper ads, and interstitial (pop-up) ads. Sure, the number of click-throughs on your ads has declined, but you chalk it up to people being busy with publishing their own content and being too distracted by Facebook and Twitter activity to pay attention the way they used to do.

You might even be concerned about losing control of your content or copyrights. Nobody fully controls information that’s published online. SME acknowledges and encourages not only the consumption of the information you put out there but also lets others interpret, remix (by adding their own ideas), and share it. You can still protect your copyrights and trademarks in social media as you have been doing over the past several years on the Internet. But in SME, you want people to spread your message, and you need to let them do it in their own ways.

Let’s face it: This isn’t your grandparents’ marketing campaign. The world of marketing online as you once knew it has changed drastically since social networks entered the scene, and it’s changing even as you read this blog.