Analyzing Engagement

Social media is all about customer engagement. It’s this engagement that helps to retain a customer, and to encourage the type of loyalty that results in referrals and recommendations.

The problem is, how do you measure this customer engagement—especially in the B2B environment, with its long sales cycles? It’s a somewhat subjective analysis—although some objective metrics exist.

Forrester Research has proposed that customer engagement be defined as the level of involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence that an individual or company has with a brand over time.¹ If we accept this definition, we have four components that we can analyze:

1. Forrester Research, “What Engagement Means for Media Companies,” 2009

• Involvement, or customer presence at various “touch points.” This is the most numeric metric here; you’re measuring things such as page views, number of comments, and the like.