Brands have measured engagement since the beginning of social marketing. We couldn’t have chosen a worse metric.
Facebook included engagement data its first Facebook Ads dashboard in 2007. That same year Forrester declared engagement “marketing’s new key metric.” Ever since, brands have listed engagement as their standard social metric.
But measuring engagement has proven disastrous for marketers. This insidious metric fails to gauge our success, undermines our ability to improve social marketing, and ultimately makes us look stupid.
My new Marketing Land column reveals how engagement — still brands’ favorite social metric and the one most commonly cited by vendors and trade press — holds us back, and how we can solve this problem. I hope you’ll give it a read.
Image source: Sprout Social