And that’s okay.

Repeat after me – it’s okay for brands to see social networks as a vehicle for advertising…

Both Facebook and Twitter offer media packages that enable you to get your message in front of millions of people. Good old fashioned broadcast advertising. Of course, there are nuances to this type of advertising – Twitter’s angle is reactive or moment based, whereas Facebook’s preferred route seems to be photography based imagery that people will ‘like’.

Two elephants in the room. Firstly, it’s difficult to drive sales at scale when you focus on a few customers (especially customers that probably buying more of your product that the average consumer). Secondly, some brands will struggle to offer social value beyond discounting – how many people really want to have a conversation with their laundry products?

If you are aiming to drive loyalty, improve customer relationships, increase frequency or value of purchase amongst a core group then it makes sense to use an always on approach that relies on organic reach supported with a bit of targeted paid. You’re looking to engage a core group of customers so measuring on interaction levels and engagement makes sense as they are good indicators of how content is resonating with brand fans.

If on the other hand you want to get mass scale and awareness then it makes sense to look beyond your fan base and focus on targeting your message at a broader audience. Most brands only have a small percentage of their customers following them on Twitter or Facebook, and obviously even fewer non-customers. If you were to target just your existing fans then you’d essentially be ignoring most of your customers and almost all of your potential new customers. As such, engagement alone isn’t a good proxy for a successful piece of content for mass scale.

That’s not to say the content you use shouldn’t be engaging. ALL content should be engaging, whether you’re taking to a handful of your biggest fans or millions of infrequent purchasers. Engagement means different things in different content. It can mean as little as standing out, getting and keeping people’s attention right through to causing an immediate reaction such as liking a Facebook post or retweeting something.

The point is that the role of engagement differs. When talking to your loyal customers engagement is the end goal – the aim is that by keeping them engaged they’ll remain loyal and continue to purchase, or even by more. When you’re trying to reach broadcast levels, mass awareness, that engagement is there to help boost reach and make it effective. More people will see your content because of the viral impact social interactions (likes, comments, shares etc) and when they do see it they themselves well find it more engaging because of the social proof or seeing that other people have interacted with it.

Before the deluge of social media experts jump on me shouting “ENGAGEMENT IS KING, BROADCAST IS DEAD” I should point out that I think many, if not most brands would be missing a trick if they focused purely on using social networks for mass reach and ignored the opportunity to drive deeper levels of engagement. Equally though, it’s also the case that using social networks purely as ways to drive loyalty amongst a few are going to be wasting money if they take an engagement focused approach and solely allocate their time, effort and media spend in this way all the while expecting huge reach.

As always, the important thing is to know what your objectives are then act and measure accordingly.

There seems to be a lot of confusion over engagement rates. in the simplest possible terms, an engagement rate is a measure of how many people are engaging vs the number of people who actually could be engaging. Due to the nature of the different platforms there are likely to be different rates for Facebook vs Twitter etc, but a good rule of thumb is to divide the number of interactions with your base. It isn’t rocket science. However, looking across the barren landscape of brand social media pages, achieving and maintaining high engagement levels does seem to be. So what’s going wrong? Broadly speaking there are six reasons why your engagement rate is low…

Your content is crap

Let’s face it; creating content that is funny, likable, shareable is actually quite hard for most brands. Historically all they’ve had to worry about is a few big campaigns a year that they get months to prepare for. Now they’re expected to churn out post after post of high quality, engaging content

You’re not segmenting

Your audience is made up of lots of different types of people. Sure they will have certain things in common, but they will also have wildly varying passions and interests. What one may love reading about, another might hate. You need to do work to do work to understand what is most engaging to the different groups in your audience, and work out a way to get it to them. Whether that means posting at different times, or putting different content on different platforms. A good example is location dependent content. Do your fans care about the event you are hosting in a city miles away from where they live? Where appropriate and possible you should geolocate content like this. If you can’t target these groups independently you need to work out whether your niche content is going to get poor levels of engagement from your broad audience, or worse, alienate them.

Your timing is wrong

Agencies and brands are businesses. Businesses tend to think between 9 and 5. This leads to a very limited view of when to post content, people use of social networking isn’t constrained by working hours, so neither should a brand’s. I remember once being told that the best time to post for a particular brand I was working on was just after 9am. Turns out that we only ever posted at around 9am, around noon, and just before 5, and 9am was the best performing time of the three. We’d never considered posting before 9am, or after 5pm, so we had no idea if they’d be good times. The minute we started exploring different times our engagement rates started to improve. That said, I’m not going to tell you that the best of day to post is Thursday at 6pm, because that’s nonsense. Ignore the plethora of studies that come out and tell you the best times to post based on averages from a number of brands. Find out for yourself when the best time to post your content. Test, learn, fail and adapt.

You’re asking too much (or offering too little)

A lot of brands are still in the big campaign mind-set, believing they have to do big, expensive, media driven campaigns. Share your brand experience in 500 words or more. Upload your video to our Facebook page. Download our latest app. Asking people to do anything is always going to be tricky. Most people are lazy, especially if there’s nothing in it for them. You want them to put in time and effort? You’d best be offering them an incentive.

You’re attracting the wrong kind of fans

In the mad rush to acquire fans, many brands, often led by their media agencies, have run like ads, run promotions, offered freebies. And it’s works. The problem is, the people that have now liked the page have done so not because they like your brand, but because they want a prize or a discount. They don’t want you to deliver on brand messaging; they want your free stuff. And if there’s nothing in it for them, they won’t be liking any content, or adding their comments, they’ll just be ignoring you

You’ve got too much reach

Generally speaking the more people that see a piece of content, the less likely any one of them is to engage with that piece of content. Imagine you have a core group of fans that always interact with your content, a group of 10,000. If your total fan reach is 100,000 then your engagement rate is 10%. But say you want to get more reach and choose to spend money on paid media to push your content further. Your core group will see the content, but the likelihood that the people who don’t belong to this core group are going to be as engaged is much lower, and the more reach you have, the less likely they are to be engaged.

Your brand / product isn’t ‘engaging’

It’s a hard thing to come to terms with, but not all brands are actually that engaging, certainly not from a social point of view. In fact, most aren’t. Does anyone really want to have a conversation with bleach on Facebook? But, at the end of the day, does it really matter. Long before Facebook and Twitter came along we had advertising, advertising that people couldn’t interact with, couldn’t go online to comment on. But it was still ‘engaging’ – even if it didn’t have a call to action to follow on Facebook. And you know what, it sold a lot of product. It worked because it raised awareness and got the brand front of mind. And for a lot of brands that’s all you need. You don’t need the likes, the comments, the web 2.0 definition of engagement. You need a message that reaches engages people, whether they click a button to tell you they were engaged or not. Because that’s what sells product. That’s advertising.

Now that’s not to say that engagement rates aren’t important. In fact, from a platform perspective they are very important, especially with the likes of Facebook where how engaging you are has a massive impact on your reach. Interactions with the page is a strong component in edge rank, the algorithm that determines who and how many people will see your brand’s content.

That said, chasing engagement rates alone is a very dangerous idea. Especially when you consider that most social media is (or really should be) supported with paid media spend. By nature of the calculation, having a low engagement rate could simply mean you’re reaching an awful lot of people with your message…

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It’s even hinted that because engagement is so important that even measuring is a waste of effort. That we should focus 100% on engagement rates as this is the only true measure of success in social media. That it’s about quality not quantity.

Nonsense.

Marketing is about sales. And for all brands, to varying degrees, sales are about numbers. As marketers we shouldn’t be debating quality or quantity. We should always aim for both.

Sure, we often need to sacrifice a little scale to get quality. Media targeting is based on this principle. But quantity is always important.

If you’ve set up your social team at incredible expense, with community managers, some social managers and a few senior people for good measure, then you need to be showing significant return. And a few likes won’t cut it. A handful of highly engaged fans is almost certainly a poor use of budget. Unless of course you work in the super luxury market, where you only ever aim for a handful of customers. In the world of FMCG it’s a failure.

This isn’t a debate in other media. We all know that banner ads can have impressions in the millions, but if it’s not engaging, if people ignore it, if it has a poor click through rate, we generally consider them ineffective.

Consider a TV advert – I just can’t imagine there is ever a debate between whether a TV ad should aim for numbers or compelling creative. We know they can reach huge swathes of our audience, but unless the ad itself is engaging, is funny, emotive, entertaining and makes people want the product then someone somewhere hasn’t done their job

Reach and engagement go hand in hand in any good marketing plan. You need both. So can we just stop trying to debate a non-issue?

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A good example of social currency is gossip, people will share rumours with their friends, who in turn will share with their friends, which is why rumours can spread like wildfire. But the key to understanding social currency is to understand the psychology behind sharing, why do people want to share? Ultimately people share when it benefits them, when they get some personal value out of sharing. The single most important component of social currency is personal value.

Basic human needs

Personal value itself is typified by fulfilling two basic human needs, the need to belong and the need to feel significant.

Humans are social beings; we are compelled to identify ourselves as belonging to groups of similar people. This need to belong is the most important element of personal value – people share content to show that they belong to a certain group of people. People will join groups on Facebook to show that they belong, quite literally, to that group of people. Just as people will tend to dress themselves according to quite specific social groups, the things we share and advocate are just another way of identifying ourselves with a group.

Within these groups individuals want to feel valued in that group; they want a feeling of significance. People who share content do so to get recognition from others in that group and in doing so give themselves significance. An offline analogy is an individual in a group of friends who always wants to be the one telling jokes; they gain significance by sharing jokes with their friends.

Social currency therefore not only provides value to the end users, but also provide additional personal value as a form of currency when shared.

Four further types of Value

Personal value can be broken down into four further types of value: Utility, Knowledge, Entertainment and Monetary.

Utility

This is literally something useful, be it a piece of useful content such as a “how to” guide or a fully fledged branded utility. Branded utilities are where brands create something that provides a tangible, useful benefit to users, such as banks providing applications that allow users to compare the various interest rates

Knowledge

A different kind of value can be gained when people share knowledge within their group. This can start from people who remind their friends that a mutual friend’s birthday is approaching right through to thought leaders in industry, who produce white papers and innovative new methods of working. The personal value is a reward for individuals who share their knowledge; they are valuable members of that community.

Entertainment

Probably the oldest and certainly one of the most common, types of social currency that provides personal value from entertainment is the joke. People tell each other jokes to make members of their group laugh, just as they share funny videos with their social networks and email each other funny pictures. Providing entertaining social currency to your peers gives you significance within your peer group.

Monetary

The final type of value a user can receive from social currency is monetary or financial value. A good example is the online coupons that brands encourage their customers to share with their friends, entitling them to a discount. It is of value not only to the end user, but also to the sharer, as their community gives them kudos for sharing the discount.

Multiplying the effect

These values are not delivered in isolation however, the types of value can be combined to provide stronger social currency, with common examples including useful financial knowledge in the form of “How to live on a budget” guides or entertaining information, which explains why infographics are so widely popular.

At the end of the day, if your brand doesn’t have social currency, if the content it produces isn’t entertaining or useful, if it doesn’t share knowledge or provide a monetary benefit to users then people won’t share it. So what social currency does your brand have?