2021 Prediction: Less Focus on Traffic and Followers, More Focus on Engagement

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While it's always good to have a large following, engagement is the social media marketing metric you need to pay attention to in 2021 and beyond.

For years, social media marketing strategies have largely focused on growing the audience of your social media channels as much as possible.

After all, even the best content in the world won't do your cash app database brand much good if no one sees it and it just speaks into the void.

That said, however, there is much more to the equation than simply attracting as many followers as possible and so-called “vanity metrics” such as follower count are not the goal of social media marketing.

As companies like Facebook and Twitter continue to place increasing value on audience engagement, rather than audience size, brands in 2021 will need to shift their focus to driving engagement as well.

In this article, we'll look at why a large following and high engagement don't always go hand in hand, as well as what you can do to ensure you're getting the most value possible from the audience you've built.


The growing importance of engagement
Imagine for a moment that you are an actor, like a comedian. Would you rather perform in front of a stadium full of distracted people who are not particularly interested in the jokes you are telling or perform in front of a medium-sized crowd that is excited and hanging on your every word?

While performing in front of a massive crowd has its benefits, performing in front of a receptive and engaged crowd is sure to be a much more rewarding experience.

The same concept applies to your social media channels, as social media platforms continue to tip the balance toward audience engagement through their ranking algorithms.

Gone are the days when you could just throw up a post and be confident that most of your followers would see it.

Today, even a post shared on a Page with tens of thousands of followers can only be shown to a small fraction of those followers, in case it doesn't generate enough engagement for the platform's algorithms to deem it worth promoting.

For example, let's say you launch a post to an audience of 100,000 people that doesn't generate much engagement in the form of likes, comments, clicks, and shares.

In this case, your post may only be seen by a few thousand people, even if your number of followers is much larger.

Now, consider a post shared to an audience of 20,000 followers that generates a high level of engagement. This second post is much more likely to be considered more valuable and therefore shown to a higher percentage of your followers.

In other words, a brand that posts valuable, engaging content to an audience of 20,000 followers is likely to reach more people at the end of the day than a brand with five times as many followers that posts uninteresting content.

And this doesn't even take into account the fact that engagement in the form of comments and shares will often expose your content to users outside of your page's followers, helping to expand your reach even further.

But the importance of engagement doesn’t stop there. In addition to helping ensure that your content is seen by as many followers as possible, focusing on engagement will also help you get more value from the people who view it.

Views alone don’t usually translate into revenue. Instead, what best translates into revenue when it comes to social media marketing is when your content is seen by an engaged audience who will take the time to digest your posts and click on the links you’re promoting.

Again, having your post appear in the feeds of tens of thousands of users won't offer much value if all they're doing is scrolling past it.

Instead, cultivating an engaged audience interested in what you have to say through engaging content is a much better approach to ensuring a return on your investment than focusing on size alone.

How to improve your brand engagement in 2021
If you’re looking to increase the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts in 2021 and beyond, improving your engagement should be your primary focus. And the only surefire way to do that is by publishing content that your audience is excited to engage with.

This means publishing high-quality content that will inform, entertain and provoke emotional responses from your audience instead of releasing content that is irrelevant and does not represent added value for your brand to the public.

In our ad-saturated world, social media audiences are less interested than ever in seeing posts that offer no value beyond the product they are promoting, let alone showing such content to their users. This doesn’t mean you should give up on promoting your brand’s products and services to your followers.

Instead, it means that you'll need to find creative ways to post content that promotes your brand and offers some sort of value to the viewer in the form of entertainment, information, or both. A great way to accomplish this task is to create content that's designed to be interactive, such as a poll or quiz your followers can complete, a video they can watch, or a link to an article they can click on to read.

Content like this, which requires interaction and engagement to be enjoyed, is likely to generate much more engagement than a text-only post that is too easy to scroll past and ignore.

Of course, making sure you're posting content that's genuinely interesting and valuable to your followers is essential no matter what type of content you're posting.

Even non-interactive content, such as text-only posts, can generate high engagement if it is entertaining, informative, or emotionally gripping.