Engagement & How To Generate It

Now that we know the nature of the Education phase and that it occurs largely before a fan hits our email list, we have clarity on where we can expect to be doing a lot of our work within this phase: on social media.

A paramount component of everything we teach at Indepreneur is data trackability. In almost all cases, we want to conduct our marketing on a platform that allows us to activate what we call a “return path”. The return path is the method by which we can reach back out to a prospective fan once they’ve come in contact with us for the first time.

For example - if someone first finds us on Spotify, there is no return path available. This is because we cannot track them in any meaningful way on Spotify. We can’t place our Facebook pixel on the platform in order to put them in a custom audience for retargeting later on, nor can we get their email address or phone number for direct-to-consumer marketing either.

When it comes to Facebook and Instagram, nearly every action taken on the platform that relates to our profile can be used to create a return path using the power of Custom Audiences. We will get more into this, but you can get more information on Custom Audiences in our 1’s and 0’s 101 training as well as our Green Light Warmth Boosting training.

So, why is this relevant to the Education phase and ensuring our audience is primed for the Permission phase?

Well, since the Education phase largely occurs through tactics on social media channels, we know that we have a variety of metrics available to us to track. Further, we can be deliberate about what metrics we want to track and what they mean for our progress in developing an ‘educated’ audience. We might call these “KPI”s down the road - that stands for Key Performance Indicators.

There is a convenient buzzword that represents trackable interaction on social media...and that word is: Engagement!

Henceforth, we will be considering engagement as the currency of the education phase. Someone watched a video? ENGAGED. Liked a post? ENGAGED. Messaged you? ENGAGED!

...You get it.

As you can see, there are many different types of engagement. Some may indicate more “Warmth” than others - so it’s up to us to be intentional about what kinds of engagement we’re tracking and what we take them to mean.

Let’s take note of all of our potentially relevant Engagement metrics and see how they can be useful to us:

Page (and Post) Engagement

While we are broadening the concept of ‘engagement’ just a bit for this training, Facebook & Instagram have specific definitions for the word itself. These cover a wide swath of interactions that we will be targeting for throughout the training.
Facebook’s definition for Engagement includes any of the following actions:

• Reacts
• Comments
• Shares
• Clicks (of any kind!)
• FB Page Visits

Instagram’s definition for Engagement includes any of the following actions:

• Likes
• Comments
• Shares
• Saves
• Swipes
• Clicks (of any kind!)
• IG Page Visits

Video Views

Whether it be at 3 seconds or 95% of the whole duration, we can track video views at various subdivisions to generate audiences of “varying” warmth.

This is a great tool for gathering an audience with a qualitative level of engagement rather than something more binary, such as “reacted, or did not react”

Events

Facebook events have their own realm of engagement that can be leveraged. Largely, the engagement involves those who have RSVP’d to the event in some manner (Going or Interested), however engagements relating to those who entered the ticket purchasing process through an Eventbrite connection have now been added.

You can also create engagements based on those who have visited the event page. This can be useful if you are creating virtual hangouts for your education audience.

Website Views

While not occurring on social media, website views are particularly valuable metrics as they indicate high interest in deeper level content - not to mention, the user felt free to brave the journey outside of the intense convenience of that endless scroll news feed!
You can also use the “Visitors by Time Spent” metric to capture qualitative page views, not unlike the Video Views metric.

While some of these metrics may appear more useful than others, a large component of this training will be about defining our own value. The fact that we can track all of these metrics allows us to create systems that string different interactions together into something that is meaningful to us.

At this point, we will want to create our own KPIs in order to understand audience warmth.

Now you know everything there is to know about why we want to engage our fans on social media and how we can begin to track these interactions into some meaningful down the road. With that being said, let’s start to look at ways to intentionally capitalize on these tracked interactions in the next set of videos.