photo credit: angeldust_350
Are you working for awareness or engagement in your social media marketing? And do you realize that there is a huge grey area in between those two goals? (It’s called interaction.) I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, probably because I keep seeing a message of “get massive visibility using social media,” or “get known, get found, blah, blah, blah” or whatever the flavor of the month is in taglines. It’s frustrating, to say the least because these promises of social media profitability are seriously crippling legit business owners in actually getting results from their investment (which tends to be massive, in time and opportunity costs).
Awareness is visibility, your audience STARTS with awareness of you. This is ultimately the beginning of your relationship with them, at the surface level. They are aware you exist, possibly aware of why you exist, but that’s about it. You’re in front of them… Awareness does not contribute to revenues except to begin the sales cycle (note, I did not say sales funnel, they ARE two VERY different things). Social media activities that you might be using to increase awareness include social media optimization, using Ping.fm to broadcast your message across multiple newtorks, and the like.
Engagement is where the magic happens — where your audience takes meaningful action at a level that is much more than just seeing and being “aware” of you. Now, don’t confuse this with interaction, the huge grey area in between awareness and engagement. Interaction is part of the “dance” that happens while you’re building a relationship with your audience that leads to engagement. Interaction is at a slightly deeper level than the surface where awareness happens, but make no mistake it is not engagement. I repeat, it is not engagement.
Let me take a moment to get a pet peeve off my chest, and a big mistake I believe many social media “marketers” are making when they teach and promote their expertise. Too often, they confuse and encourage their audience to be confused by teaching interaction and awareness as an indicator your social media efforts are successful. They are ONLY A PORTION of what you should be measuring and you are likely wasting your time entirely if all you are doing is creating awareness and some level of interaction.
An example would be social media experts who obsess about retweets. I know, I know, I’m totally going against the grain here, but the number of retweets you get is NOT an indication of engagement. In fact, it’s one of the simplest forms of interaction you can find. How hard is it, to click a button and simply retweet a message that some person in a stream published? Not very. Is that engagement or interaction? I call it interaction, and a sorry level at that.
For solopreneurs and small businesses, my team, instead, considers different levels of retweets. Meaning, simple retweets are given MUCH LESS weight than those that actually comment and contain a positive sentiment when sharing. The fact that someone took the time to place a comment and type a message, is a much higher level than someone simply pushing a button. Also, these days, many don’t even push the retweet themselves – they simply feed RSS into a tool like TweetBurner or Tweetlater and put a snazzy “RT @someone:” before it, so it appears to be a retweet — again, engagement or interaction — or neither?
Engagement is much more meaningful and greatly contributes to the sales cycle (good or bad), ultimately greatly impacting your bottom line results across the board. Engagement will allow your audience to learn more about you that will contribute to their motivation for deeper engagement and ultimately purchase from you. Meaningful engagement will also help you learn more about your audience to know how to build deeper relationships and how to motivate them to go deeper with you or purchase from you. Engagement is a beautiful thing.
What’s the Big Diff?
Huge! If all you ever do is create awareness and interaction at superficial levels that mean nothing to your audience, you will fail and fail miserably in your social media efforts. You also need to understand, what you do to build awareness, might not (and often will not) be the same tool or tactics you use to build interaction that leads to meaningful engagment.
Chew on this for a bit:
Are the tools and strategies you’re using building awareness, interaction, or engagement? And which are building what? How much time are you spending on awareness versus interaction versus engagement?
Remember…
Step 1: Awareness, the art of being found, being known, being visible.
Step 2: Interaction, the art of getting involved in the conversation and getting surface level responses.
Step 3: Engagement, the art of building meaningful relationships that benefit your audience and your company, that go far beyond look at me and my stuff.
Without all three (and beyond, but that’s another post), you’re seriously missing the many benefits that social media and online marketing have to offer your bottom line.
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Looking forward to connecting with you… and engaging!
Maria 
PS. Here’s another question for you… How much engagement do you think those $97 ebooks and $297 social media blueprints are teaching you? I’m just saying 
About the Author...
Maria Reyes-McDavis is a colossal geek brainiac, certified genius IQ with university degrees in Finance, Economics, Business Management and an MBA. Maria has served over 300 pro-level, digital marketing clients as founder of online marketing firm Digital Peas & Carrots. Maria is Founder and Editor of Hyphenated Americans, a conservative politics blog and Proverbs 31 Project an online women's ministry. Most importantly, Maria is a wife to her king, mother of 3, lover of basketball (Go Lakers & Clippers!), classic cars and is currently training for professional women's roller derby!
