When it comes to content marketing, everyone wants better and higher content engagement.
All those hours we invest in writing, recording, posting, and sharing content should hopefully count for something.
Right? Well, hopefully.
However, the problem is that when it comes to content engagement, it is a broad concept.
Even worse, finding specific ways to measure content engagement can be frustrating. There are hundreds of dashboards and marketing tools to choose from, and trying to figure out what all the data means is exhausting.
In the digital marketing world, there are many forms of engagement. This article will look at content engagement and social media engagement and different ways to measure your content marketing’s success.
A Definition of Content Engagement
Content engagement is any action a person takes on a piece of online content or web page. You create something valuable or entertaining, and they respond by interacting.
Their action (clicking, liking, sharing, subscribing, commenting) sends a signal to the search engines and each social media platform that this was great content and deserves higher engagement in the future.
More relevant and engaging content helps search engines and social media platforms to keep users engaged. Therefore, it is in their interest to promote the content type that will entice their target audience on both websites and mobile apps.
Measuring Website Content Engagement
While social media usually dominates the discussion around engagement, your website is more important for most businesses. Your digital content lives on your website and is owned by you.
In contrast to content on social media platforms, who own the site people see your content on, your website belongs to you.
For this reason, a big part of your content strategy should be to focus on drawing more viewers to your website whenever possible. Lead generation and attracting more potential customers are the most important engagement metrics.
To make sure you are getting the best possible website content engagement numbers, here are three ways to measure the value of your content engagement.
Website Pages Per Session
(First, you will need to set up your Google Analytics account. Once you are activated, you then go to Audience –> Overview.)
The Pages per session metric tells you how many pages an average visitor visits during one session on your website.
This content engagement metric can tell you:
- How well your web page answered your user’s questions on your website
- Whether your website visitors want to continue browsing your site
The quality of your content and the strength of your calls to action (CTAs) will influence this content engagement metric. It will also be an indication of other metrics such as bounce rate.
Ensure your content answers the question(s) that brought the user to your website, and make sure every single page includes a clear, compelling CTA, encouraging your reader to learn more.
Forms Submitted
(In Google Analytics, click on Conversions –> Goals –> Overview)
Form submissions and completions on your website are an effective way to measure how interested your Audience is in your content.
A form completion is when a website visitor provides their personal information (name, email address, phone number) to request more information or receive something.
Some businesses will use gated content such as email newsletters, a white paper, instructional courses, or videos to entice people to share their contact information.
The number of form completions you have is closely related to the value you’re offering. In some industries and especially for B2B marketers, these kinds of lead magnets can increase brand awareness.
If you want to ensure an increase in your content’s engagement, make it easy for them to access. For example, if you want people to sign up for your email newsletter, make sure you put a call to action at the end of every blog post.
Bounce Rate & Exit Pages
(In Google Analytics, click on Behavior –> Overview)
Getting people to visit your website is only half the battle when it comes to content engagement. Audience engagement is also measured by how many people leave immediately.
Keep an eye on which pages tend to have a higher exit rate and lower bounce rate. Ideally, anything under 40-60% bounce rate is a good sign that your content is very engaging. But of course, many websites will have a higher bounce rate, close to 80-90%.
To grow your engagement rate, make sure you are working on creating blog posts and web pages that help answer questions or solve your target audience’s problems.
Measuring Social Media Engagement
Social media is the most commonplace that a marketer will look at for content engagement. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok attract massive audiences and offer significant potential.
Social media marketing also offers sophisticated targeting capabilities, so you can reach the target audience you want to sell to. Brand awareness and brand loyalty can also be cultivated on social media platforms and can use them for lead generation very effectively.
Each social platform has unique ways to interact with content. (For example, people will like, comment, and share on Facebook. They will like, comment, and retweet a tweet on Twitter.)
A share on social media channels is an effective content engagement action because your content will then appear in the social feeds of people they know.
These content engagement metrics actions can be tracked to help assess the content that best resonates with your target audience.
With this in mind, here are some of the best content engagement metrics for social media content that can help grow your customer engagement.
Likes, Comments, and Shares
Most social media platforms will have native analytics, or you can also access them through a third-party social media management platform, such as Klipfolio.
Regardless of the way you measure it, typically, you are going to be looking at three important social media metrics:
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
These three factors are usually what marketers are talking about when using the term ‘social media engagement.’
Likes, comments, and shares are important because they indicate how relevant and engaging your social media post is. They also signal to social platforms which user-generated content to show other users.
Keep in mind that no matter how high your content engagement, a social media post has a short shelf life. Meaning, as soon as you publish it, it starts to lose value.
Social platforms need to keep their users on their platform. The longer a person is on the news feed, the better chance they have to advertise to them and increase their revenue. Interactive content will always do better than branded content (i.e., advertisements) on social media, but the real goal is to drive more ads to the end-user.
To ensure high social media content engagement, make sure you understand how your Audience uses a particular platform. For example, Instagram engagement comes down to visual content. Instagram stories and other types of ephemeral marketing are also very popular in the current social media trends.
Therefore, you must create social media content that fits into that experience. Compelling visual content, intriguing headlines, real human stories, and humor are great ways to attract more attention to your branded content.
Reach and Impressions
Reach on a social platform means the total number of users who viewed a piece of content. Impressions track the total amount of times that piece of content was seen, regardless of the user.
For example, if one user views a content piece five times, the reach for that piece of content would be one, and the impressions would be five.
While reach and impressions might not signify direct engagement, they give you a sense of how your content performs.
You can also quickly calculate the ratio between people who saw your content and those who engaged (viewed, liked, commented) with it.
Both reach and impressions can be meaningful content engagement numbers to track. They give you a feel for what types of content seem to resonate and will get views from your potential customers.
How to Grow Content Engagement
Regular content creation on your social media accounts and website is not enough anymore. You must first know what the people you are trying to attract want when they are on each platform. And your content format should also make it easy for them to get what they want.
Understand the Platform
No matter how or where you’re hoping to spark engagement, it’s essential to understand how and why your Audience uses that platform.
Facebook users are very different from TikTok or Twitter users. They have different interests and behaviors that they will undertake.
Each platform also has different rules (such as hashtags or @mentions) and algorithms. It will promote certain content over other types, and it will aim to keep users engaged with the platform.
The best method for understanding the nuances of each social platform is to use them yourself. Get a feel for what it’s like to be a user and why you may want to see specific types of posts.
Also, try different types of media. Images, videos, long-form written content, and short-form video content (such as stories on Instagram or fleets on Twitter).
Once you have a feel for the platforms and understand how they work, you are ready to start to grow on them.
Play By the Rules
Over the ten years, engagement on platforms like Facebook have shrunk dramatically. This reduction is partly due to a massive influx of users and user-generated content, and also because most social platforms are built to increase ad revenue.
For this reason, you must have your content marketing geared explicitly toward a goal. Whether that goal is increasing new leads, growing brand awareness, or increasing the discussions through interactive content, you should know what you’re trying before you start.
Be aware that merely getting eyeballs onto your social media content is no longer enough. There must be a call to action or a purpose behind what you post.
Also, be aware that all social media platforms will reward you for keeping users on the platform. For example, if you post a native video to Instagram or Facebook, it will be seen by more people than if you attempt to send them to a Youtube link. Facebook doesn’t want to encourage people to leave their website or mobile app, so they will lower the visibility of any outbound links.
When it comes to your website, use your Google Analytics to determine which pages have higher bounce rates or lower form completion rates.
If your engagement levels are low, you can consider moving and CTA’s to a more visible part of the website. This change may have the same results as attempting to get readers to get all the way to the bottom of your webpage or blog post.
Know your Audience
The final point for better content engagement is to know how you are marketing to. Setting up detailed buyer personas might be great for marketers who want vanity metrics. But if you don’t relate to the people who buy from you, it’s useless.
Take the time to engage in real life with those who buy from you. Ask them what they value about your products and services, and find out what problems you can help them solve.
Rather than obsess about conversion rate, or trying to copy the latest influencer, consider what each unique visitor wants and how you can help them.
At the end of the day, content engagement is all about value. If what you create doesn’t serve your prospects and their unique needs, it won’t get shared, and it won’t drive sales.