Interaction, Engagement, Influence

Back in the 40’s Abraham Maslow(1) put forth the proposition that humans are motivated by needs. Maslow postulates that each low level need must be satisfied before the next higher need can be addressed. It makes a certain sense. Without the foundation, you can’t build walls. Without the walls, you can’t build the roof. His pyramid of needs has served as a model for understanding human behavior ever since.(2)

I maintain that a similar hierarchy exists in social media marketing.

Marketing is about getting people to do what you want. Doesn’t matter if you’re selling toothpaste, insurance, or an elected official. Your goal is to get people to do the thing you need them to do. Buy the toothpaste. Enroll in the plan. Vote for the person. For that to happen you have to influence the public’s behavior.

Mass marketing has been with us almost forever. From the Molly Malone to carny barkers. From paperboys to fast food restaurants. From magazines and billboards to television and radio. Mass media has developed some pretty compelling models regardless of what scale the seller operates on. The mass marketing is getting your message to as many people as possible in the hope that some tiny fraction of people will hear your message and take the desired action.

Social media marketing has only really been a thing for the last twenty years or so. The desired result – get people to take the desired action – is the same but the process is different. Social media marketing strives to get your message to only those people who want to hear it so that a large percentage of those people will do what you want. Mass market techniques are antithetical to social media because social media messaging is controlled by the receiver, not the sender.(3)

That’s a long set up to understand the three levels that govern social media marketing.

Interaction is the base. Without some level of interaction, nothing else is possible. It’s where you get likes, retweets, and followers. It’s requires nearly nothing of the receiver – only that they don’t block, unfriend, or unfollow you. Most social media marketing advice tells you how to grow your numbers but not how to move up the pyramid.

Engagement is the next tier. This is where people actually pay attention to you, maybe talk back to you by leaving comments or adding their own ideas to a re-tweet. Engagement is a required – but not sufficient – condition.

Influence is the goal. Just like mass media marketing, social media marketing works to get people to do what you want. For authors – particularly self published ones – it’s “buy the book.” There are other less demanding goals that you might pursue – sign up for the email list, leave a review, tell a friend – but the ultimate goal for authors in doing social media marketing is to sell more books.

Here’s the thing:

Most measures of influence *kough*klout*kough* use interaction as a proxy for engagement. Advice on how to get more followers, more friends, bigger numbers only applies to interaction. Sure you need to reach people but these numbers by themselves are meaningless. How many are bots? How many just follow you because you’re a joke to them? How many just clicked like because it’s almost a reflex action and not any kind of thoughtful response?

You can actually get a sense for engagement by comments and quoted retweets. It’s a rough measure because most engagement will come from the lurkers – that 90% of people below the surface who actually follow what you do and pay attention to it, think about it, but don’t actually step out of the ether to make themselves known to you. It’s why counting doesn’t really work here. Numbers aren’t the answer and can be misleading.

Influence is even harder to measure because the action you want people to take isn’t an action done in social media. It’s invisible in that realm and only shows up in sales. The problem gets compounded by delays between message and action fostered by the internet. _Once on the internet, forever on the internet._ A comment you left on somebody’s blog last month could drive a sale next week. Messages you put out last year could result in actions taken next year. You find yourself in the position of seeing a spike in sales when you’ve done nothing to promote your work, because somebody somewhere referenced a tweet that you responded to and forgot about.

Bottom line:

Keep interaction going by remembering that – on social media – “yes” is conditional but “no” is forever. Foster engagement by being engaged with your audience – don’t robo-tweet, reply to comments, like and +1 posts. Remember that your goal is not numbers, but engagement. A mailing list of 20,000 names where only one or two percent click through to your book is much less valuable than a list of 1000 names where eighty percent open and fifty percent click through. It means you have more influence and it’s influence that gets you sales.

 

1. Maslow, A.H. (1943). “A theory of human motivation”. Psychological Review. 50 (4): 370–96. doi:10.1037/h0054346 – via psychclassics.yorku.ca.
2. The other model is called the “expectation theory” – or sometimes “drives theory.” It suggests that people are motivated by experience and that a person’s motivation to undertake a task will be based on prior experience and their expectation of how much they’ll enjoy the reward they’ll get from doing it. Restated: If you expect to enjoy your day on the job, you’ll be more motivated to do it than if you expect your day will suck. If your day doesn’t suck (or doesn’t suck as much), you’re going to be more motivated to go back tomorrow and vice versa.
3. Social media is “pull.” The receiver pulls messages they want to get by controlling who they’re willing to get messages from regardless of channel. Mass media is “push” because messages are pushed to every receiver who uses the channel regardless of whether the receiver wants it or not.