It’s all the engagements. No wait, it’s all about the leads. Hold up, it’s about the engagement. Well what is it all about? This is a scene in my head all the time and I’m sure you hear the same from social media professionals too. The fact of the matter is that social media success actually relies on both.
What Is Engagement?
Engagement is the interaction that results from your social media posts. Engagement can come in many different ways. It came show up in the form of a comment on a post. It can be a share, a like or a response. Responses are the best because its public and spurs other engagement.
The reason why engagement is so important is because it shows your fans, followers and customers are listening. When they are listening and acting upon what you say, you can influence them to do other things like sign up for your newsletter.
Engagement leads to direct response. Direct response leads to sales.
What Are Leads?
Leads are different for every business. You as the business owner need to define what it is to you. But no matter what a lead should bring you closer to a sale. For us, our leads are those who sign up for our newsletter or download one of our ebooks. We consider anyone on our list a lead because we have the opportunity to market to them and hopefully sell them something that makes sense for them. That’s what marketing is all about.
Without a plan and strategy in place, gathering leads can be extremely difficult. In order to obtain leads you need traffic. To get traffic you need blog posts, an SEO strategy in place, and of course you need to be active on social media.
How can you increase your leads? By increasing the engagement on your social media channels and then asking them to sign up, download and ultimately buy.
So as you can see the two are closely connected. The next time someone says it is all about engagement, you’ll know why. Hopefully the person preaching it to you will know why too.
