Indian Social Media

Its been few months, since I have been exploring some interesting facts around engagement. However, I could finally analyze the Social  Engagement into 2 categories :

• Active Engagement

• Passive Engagement

Let’s look at both of them in detail. The active & passive engagement plays different roles based on how it is been utilized either by brands or by end users

To begin with Active Engagement: The Active Engagement category largely signifies users involvement towards every conversation made by a marketer, brand, individual. However the active engagement plays a key role towards buzz around the brand. Ideally, the active engagement is defined towards how users have been monitoring brand’s conversations and how they have been responding to them. It also signifies users contribution towards Ideas, Content etc. to the brand.

However, I don’t see any marketers or brands in India actually analyzing their Social Media engagement in these categories. All we see is they consider every engagement based on number of followers on Twitter and number of likes on a Facebook page.

Lets break this myth and let me share some key insights on how we can actually measure it. Take an example of a Facebook page insights. The Facebook page I am referring to is of one of my client i.e Volkswagen India. Lets look at the insights section, specifically the monthly active users. The current page likes is around 5100+ and the current monthly active users are 3,272. Technically speaking, the engagement level is more than 50% which is excellent and insightful. The active engagement might involve various parameters such as Likes, Comments, contributions (fan photos, videos, sharing). All these parameters match up to the Active Engagement.

Similarly, we can define engagement on every single platform, such as Video sharing, Photo sharing etc. This also defines the performance of a brand in the Social Media space. Also, based on such engagement statistics, predictions can also be made towards the future positioning of the brand. It is difficult to achieve such engagement without enabling key strategies which will also give users a reason to be a part of it.

Coming to the next category i.e Passive Engagement; Most of the times we end of achieving great statistical results, such as page likes, views.

Taking an example of one of my old client i.e Pantaloons in India. They have been very keen to earn page likes in a short period of time. However, they chose to go ahead with Facebook Ads, and in Just 4 flat weeks they achieved more than 1.5 lac page likes. Stunning Isn’t it!

But, if you actually analyze their current Facebook page which holds 5 lac fans, does not have enough engagement. To elaborate it, they do have a huge community, but the community does not reflect an healthy engagement. What is the use of having 5 Lac fans, when the response rate on each post is not even 1%. I just calculated the overall percentage of the engagement of the Pantaloons Facebook page. It comes to o.3% Monthly active participation. This means that users are not contributing to any of your engagement tactics. This would also mean that one needs to analyze what’s going wrong

This is where I would repeatedly convey the fact that Social Media is completely organic and even paid marketing tactics will not be able to achieve the desired results. However, even if you have carried out such tactic, optimistically looking , it is also a great opportunity to henceforth carry out exclusive engagement strategies. All it will deliver is multiply the current community i.e 5 Lac to 10 Lac in next few months, build large number of conversations, contributions from the users in the form of content etc. Also gives a greater opportunity for a brand to utilize such date for their product innovation, research and also understanding their consumers with deeper insights.

So to sum-up, I have tried taking such an example to define Active & Passive Engagement. However, I am still analyzing to gather more insights for every Social Media approach. I won’t state my current analysis to be final. All I can say is this is just the beginning for each one of us.

Do share your thoughts and request everyone to share your insights to my analysis and make our conversations useful to everyone of us.