The Only Mistake in Measuring Engagement
More is better, right? You just need more traffic! (…they tell us)
More clicks, more likes, a bigger email list and then everything will be just fine. Sorry to be the one breaking the bad news, it won’t.
By the end of this story, you’ll learn how a subtle shift in your perspective can significantly improve the value of your content business this year.
Let’s start with a long time ago, i.e before Google.
A business had two levers to make money: advertising and production. The catch was that a single lever wasn’t enough to make the business turn, you needed to predictably pull both levers in a sequence such that advertising created demand for production. When Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller got it right, it was a magical loop of buying advertising space, producing goods and then buying more advertising.
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted;
the trouble is I don’t know which half.
At the turn of the millennium the internet looked to solve the biggest problem with this model — the industrialists didn’t have an accurate way of tracking attention, therefore advertising was wasteful. With the magic of clicks and hits, the advertising model could be quantified (albeit with a poor indicator of value) and thrived as brands were more than happy to drop $30k to be featured on the homepage of Yahoo! for a few days. And then everything changed, again.
Enter the Content Creator Revolution with the enabling platforms of WordPress, Squarespace, Youtube, Tumblr, Medium and many others.
Today, the advertising model has morphed towards rewarding content creators who build large audiences and capture their attention for a sustained period of time. Engage the attention of your audience long enough and the advertisers will be lining up with their wallets open.
Well, that’s the plan right?
When Ev Williams started Blogger in 1999, enabling anyone to share their worldview, it was highly unlikely that a brand would divert their advertising spend from magazines to your new media. It wasn’t until Google’s Adsense materialised in 2003 where bloggers could let Google manage their advertising placements and make significant income through their content creation and influence.
Fast forward to today and the barriers to entry for creating any type of content including podcasts, videos, and blogs are close to zero. As the volume of content available explodes exponentially, there is a race for attention and loyalty.
If you successfully build trust with your audience…what will you do with it?
Do you have an engaged audience?
Yes, I know that Facebook tells you engagement on your posts and your email list metrics probably calculate the number of engaged readers. But I want to hear it from you. Really, how engaged are your audience?
Nearly everyone I ask either doesn’t know, or is afraid of knowing.
Unavoidable question #1
Why is an increase in engagement important?
Consider the industrialist 50 years ago who thought that more advertising means more attention, which (obviously) means more sales and more production. No doubt you are being sold on the idea that more engagement means more opt-ins and (obviously) more income.
Is this why you think engagement is important?
The assumptions here are nuts. Sure, there is a correlation between audience size and potential for income. However using engagement as a proxy for income is just like using the population size to determine taxation revenue. Correlation doesn’t equal causation.
However, there is a genuine reason why the measurement and optimisation of engagement matters. My friend Jason has written “…tracking and optimization of engagement is the solution to all shitty content, everywhere.”
Let’s use a metaphor.
Pick your favourite team sport. Consider that halfway through the match you take a tally of how many points your team has scored. Does this tell you a definitive story about the entire team’s performance? Of course not.
Instead, we look to see how individual players perform over time. We want to understand more than just the points they score but also how many points they stopped the opposition from scoring, how many points they enabled their team-mates to score, and most importantly — how repeatable their performance is for each and every game.
The engagement of your audience is measured in the same way. You are looking at each fan’s different behaviours over time to construct an understanding of your entire audience engagement.
I suggest checking out my friends at Filament.io for their insights around audience engagement. I’ve been using Filament products since their early beta days and I really feel their blog analytics tool is going to take the creator community by storm.
Unavoidable question #2
What does engagement teach you about your fans?
Does higher engagement mean that you are you part of your followers’ daily routines? Or, are you only part of their procrastination cycle whenever they don’t feel like working or studying (buzzfeed anyone…)?
I know, these questions are scary and you may even feel like stopping here before you read something that you can’t un-read. However in the epic battle for building your audience, you now have an opportunity to create a competitive advantage.
Hold on tight, let’s work this out together.
Who is engaged?
I’ll admit, I’m not the life of a party. Heck, I’m that guy when someone is boasting about their number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers asks:
Awesome! What are their names?
Here’s the punchline: engagement isn’t linear.
You don’t have 30 percent engagement, perform some magic content tricks and move to 40 percent engagement uniformly. Instead, you likely have some people that are 5 percent engaged, and others that are 95 percent engaged. Here is the key concept that will change the way you view your audience forever:
Your audience represents highly engaged, semi-engaged and disengaged followers.
When social media ‘experts’ tell you about improving engagement, they paint a picture in your mind a bit like this:
What’s the problem here?
You spotted it! There is an implicit assumption that all of your followers are the same.
C’mon really? You know that some people hit that like button but never really understood what you were saying. Where others could talk with for three hours and you would both leave more enlightened than you arrived.
If you a reading this article, you probably know of Tim Ferriss. In 2011, Tim hosted an event called Opening the Kimono. It was a weekend away for 200 people where Tim opened up his war chest of experiments, teaching “…a roadmap for the rarest of recipes: a repeatable and ethical content-creation and launch process that will put your product at the top and keep it at the top.”
Oh, and it was $10,000 per head (drinks included).
Tim has an audience size of 1M-2M unique visitors per month on his blog, 1.25M followers on Twitter and hundreds of thousands of downloads per episode of his podcast. Naturally it’s going to be difficult to identify which of his audience fall within the ‘will pay $10k for an event’ category.
Is there a link between Tim’s event sales and those who are engaged in his content? My bet is: absolutely. This isn’t to say that the most engaged are most likely to buy a ticket. Instead, I would imagine that 80 percent of those participants were in his top 20 percent of engaged readers.
Not all followers are equally valuable
Consider the following diagram:
What do we see here? Firstly, it’s clear that not all followers are equal. We see in the darker blue line there is a small number of highly engaged followers, lots of semi-engaged followers and unfortunately the rest that don’t remember your name.
Improving engagement in this model means changing the shape of the line — making it flatter or even possibly bending in the other direction!
Consider the Opening the Kimono example. If Tim knew exactly who in his audience met the criteria of: highly engaged, keen to connect, and had the propensity to pay for his weekend retreat, he could reach out to those people directly and make a personal invitation to join him for the weekend.
Making people feel like they are the insiders can significantly improve the conversion rate compared to the public appeal to an entire community. Because it makes us feel important, everyone is drawn to exclusivity — just not all for the same things.
Screw efficiency
Bet on effectiveness.
Sure, a cute cat video might be an efficient way to get a few more shares, clicks and likes. But seriously, does this tactic build a closer relationship with those who really care about you? My guess is that it doesn’t.
Effective content creation and marketing means that you focus on moving those 5 percent of top followers from being 50 percent engaged through to 80 percent engaged. Ignore everyone else until you have a handful of close relationships. The measure of engagement is very subjective and doesn’t actually matter as much as spending time, care and attention to those top 5 percent.
Perhaps in both diagrams the ‘average’ engagement improved from 25 to 35 percent, however the second is likely to result in a 10x improvement in value to your business. This is good, really good.
So, who is in your top 5 percent?
This story is one of a collection of Medium stories in the Own Your Followers publication. If you enjoyed this story, recommend it below and follow the publication to read more stories like this one.
