THE ENGAGEMENT TRAP

We're seeing this all the time in small-business marketing. Somewhere along the road, the act of marketing became confused with the act of posting. Open Instagram, upload a photograph, add a few hashtags, watch the likes appear, repeat tomorrow. The feed is active, the calendar is full, somebody can point to a graph and say that engagement is up 14 per cent. It looks more or less like marketing, it kinda feels like marketing. Sometimes, of course, it is marketing. But just as often it is the ‘appearance’ of marketing - a visible performance of activity that may or may not have much to do with growth.

The platforms did not create this by accident. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok democratised publishing in a way that would have seemed impossible twenty years ago. Any café, accountant, hotel, tradesperson or whisky producer can now operate its own media channel from a phone. That is genuinely useful. But access to the machinery has also created the illusion that operating the machinery is the discipline. It is a little like buying a treadmill and deciding you now understand sports science. The button says POST. There is no button marked STRATEGY.

Before social media, marketing at least forced a business to wrestle with a few awkward questions before it made anything. Who are we trying to reach? Why might they need us? What do we want them to remember? What makes us recognisable? Where should we appear? What, commercially, are we actually trying to change? Those questions haven’t gone away. They have just been buried beneath a much easier one - what shall we put on the socials today?

The conundrum is that the Platform’s interests and the business’s interests are not the same. A business needs more potential buyers to know it exists, remember it when the right occasion comes along and find it easy to buy. A platform needs content, reactions, comments, viewing time and, eventually, advertising spend. So naturally the platform gives us feedback on the things that matter to the platform. Likes. Shares. Followers. Comments. Video views. Posting frequency. The danger shows up when firms treat the platform’s scoreboard as though it were the company’s balance sheet.

This is why likes are so seductive. Real marketing outcomes are slow, messy and difficult to isolate. Did more people become aware of us? Are we more likely to come to mind when somebody needs what we sell? Did we acquire more customers? Those are harder questions to answer. A heart icon turning red is instant. The number goes up. The social media person’s brain receives its tiny reward. Over time, metric substitution occurs. The hard question, “Are we becoming more mentally available among potential buyers?” becomes the easy question, “Did Tuesday’s Reel do better than Thursday’s?” and eventually nobody remembers that the substitution took place.

The result is a sort of Goodhart’s Law with a ring light. Once engagement becomes the target, content gets engineered to generate engagement. Polls, giveaways, “tag someone who…”, trending tunes, manufactured friendliness and whatever format the algorithm is currently said to prefer according to someone on LinkedIn. None of this is necessarily useless, but the tail can begin wagging the dog. The small business thinks it is using the platform, while really it’s just supplying the platform with a steady stream of free content and then buying back access to an audience.

How to know what to do? Businesses can just look at competitors to work out what marketing in their category is ‘supposed to look like’. Hotels photograph beds and breakfasts. Restaurants photograph plates, lots of them. Estate agents pose beside SOLD signs. Accountants post tax reminders. Everyone celebrates the same awareness days, uses the same reassuring language, the same motivational quotes and ends up sounding uncannily like everyone else. Humans are excellent social learners and copying is usually a cheap and sensible response to uncertainty. Most of the time. The problem is that in marketing, what feels safest to imitate is often exactly what makes you least distinctive.

Then there is the ‘follower’ problem. The people most likely to like your posts are often the people who already know you - existing customers, friends, staff, suppliers, other local businesses and habitual engagers. If Zuckerberg and co decide to show them anything. Yet growth totally depends on reaching beyond that group, particularly the light and occasional buyers who may only need your restaurant, hotel, solicitor, garage or shop once in a while. The person who likes every post already remembers you. The person who might need you six months from now, and has never heard of you, is more important.

None of this means anyone should abandon social media. That would be daft. Social can deliver reach, demonstrate expertise, distribute ideas, create social proof and keep a brand visible. The mistake is treating it as marketing by itself.

A better starting point is with a strategy. What are we selling, really, who do we need to reach, in what situations should they think of us, what do we want them to remember, and are we making it easy for them to buy? Only then should we ask about channels and whether Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn is the right tool for the job.

The hard part is not filling the feed, the tsunami of slop should tell you that. It is deciding who must notice you, what they must remember and why, when the buying moment arrives, they should choose you.

thesignalworks.co.uk