Engagement is a means, not a goal
Back in the day, advertising was measured by reach and PR was measured in Advertising Value Equivalent (AVR). While reach was always a shaky metric to start with, PR had to make do with an even more arcane means of justifying its value.
Nowadays the onus has shifted to content marketing and reach doesn’t cut it any more. Not surprising when you think Facebook has 1.6bn users — “reach” really shouldn’t be an issue. So what do many people choose to measure instead? Engagement.
And ‘engagement’ is great right? You can measure it (shares, likes and comments primarily) and, because it shows that someone has chosen to interact with that particular piece of content, it shows how well the content is doing its job. Conversely, you can tell that stuff that doesn’t perform straightaway — low ‘engagement’ numbers.
And yet… the usual measurements of engagement don’t really tell you whether your artfully crafted think piece on the latest advances on mechanical automation in the arms industry accompanied with the cutest cat picture you can find has achieved its job. Unless of course, its job was to draw attention to a kitten looking sad.
There are three problems with focusing on engagement:
1. It elevates interaction above value
Engagement on its own is not impact, merely another form of reach. As we’ve seen with the Fake News farrago, clicks don’t equal quality and there is no algorithm for insight or intrinsic value. Sure, many of the posts with most engagement will also be among those with the most impact. But that is not always the case, and nor will it ever be. Consider a hypothetical example. A well-researched, detailed and lengthy piece — it could be investigative journalism, scientific research or even technology thought leadership — gets only three ‘likes’. Does that diminish its value? Perhaps it was too early to resonate with the current zeitgeist but it may trigger an alternative debate or movement. Do you ditch the content and go for something simpler, shorter and less complex, with the trade off that it is less impactful on those individuals? And would the world, and your company, be better off if you had not invested time and energy into some original thinking, and instead cobbled together another listicle?
2. It doesn’t describe the lasting impact of content
Engagement tracks the effect at a given point or short window of time. What if the niche target audience for your content is deeply affected by it but take no obvious action on initial reading? Or perhaps the readers are buyers who start on the journey towards purchasing services from your business with that article. But they never clicked the thumbs up button so you discount the article’s value. True thought leadership is, by its nature, both ahead of its time and a influence on its contemporary events. Yet that can only be judged in retrospect.
3. It encourages exaggerated emotionality
In the attention economy, we are all fighting for someone’s time. The current strategy is to create content that appeals to emotions so they prioritise our article/video/cat photo over another. And the strongest emotions are negative ones: anger, shock, disgust. The way our society is creating and consuming content is fostering a culture of reflex outrage. The sensationalisation of everyday life is a slippery slope: as we become more shock-proof through exposure, the bar for content gets higher (or should it be lower?)
There are, however, some good reasons for measuring engagement. Firstly, there is a dearth of other easy metrics to quantify the impact of communication. Secondly, awareness-raising may be the primary objective of a given campaign and it’s therefore important to measure how far and wide the content goes. Thirdly, it is the language that advertisers speak, and thus provides common ground and a basis for monetisation of content. However, none of these reasons address the fact that engagement does not equal the effect, only the ‘heat and noise’ generated in the instant of consumption.
How can we do things better? There’s no quick fix (if there was, I’d be selling it by now and not writing this blog). The way to think about it is this: “engagement” is a marketer’s proxy for a genuine feedback loop. If you genuinely want to know what your target audience thinks of your content, then you have to get close to them. Talk to them. Ask them. Yes, that’s costly, time-consuming and you might not get the answers you want, but it’s better in the long run than chasing the next ‘like’.
