Does your blog lack engagement? It might be because it's a blog.
Readers of this blog that have been here for the past few months know that I’ve changed the design more than a few times. And those changes aren’t going to stop.
The #1 reason I’ve changed the design so many times is that I’m trying to get more engagement from you the reader. And I’m not the only blogger out here looking for that. But what does engagement even mean, and can we get engagement from or with the readers of a blog?
Let’s talk about it today.
In order to answer the question of whether or not a blog is a good platform for engagement we first need to define the word.
What Engagement Means
Engagement has a few meanings, but the one closest to what we’re looking for is, according to the dictionary on my Mac, is:
the action of engaging or being engaged
Oh wait that doesn’t help much. Let’s see how the dictionary defines “engaged”:
(engage in) participate or become involved in
(engage with) establish a meaningful contact or connection with
This is more of what we’re looking for.
So by definition if we’re looking for more engagement we’re looking for more participation in order to create a meaningful contact or connection with our readers.
The next question is how do we do that? Let’s see how a blog helps this to happen.
Using A Blog For Engagement
Out of the box a blog has two basic functionalities:
- Publishing content
- Posting comments, including replying to existing comments
We could easily argue that both of these functions can help us get engagement. The content that we create can make a connection with a reader, and then we can strengthen that connection by replying to comments. In addition, readers can connect with each other in the comments.
While not considered a “functionality” per say the design of the blog is very important. That will be a topic of another post. But keep in mind that the look and feel contributes to the overall experience a reader has with your content, and is the next most important thing behind the content itself.
By why stop here?!
We want our content to reach more people, and let’s not forget how we like to point our colleagues, friends and family to awesome content we’ve found and think they’d be interested in, or want their feedback on.
That’s when social media share buttons come into play.
Adding On The Social Medias
The cliche “if you build it they will come” is false when it comes to content. With hundreds of millions of blogs competing for search engine rankings as well as our time if you don’t get your content in front of people – hopefully the right people – it will languish in it’s lonely corner of the interwebs.
Enter social media!
We’ve talked about social media share buttons before so there’s no need for us to get deeper into it. But needless to say that when a reader shares our content with any of their social media networks (communities?) it helps to expand our potential reach.
When those folks come back to our blogs we still need to establish those connections, which brings us back to content, comments and design.
It’s really looking like these three items form the ways we can achieve engagement - participation in order to create a meaningful contact or connection with our readers.
Perhaps this is why additional commenting systems like LiveFyre and Disqus have come about, along with premium WordPress commenting plugins that allow people to connect with their social profiles before commenting.
Another question we haven’t asked though is how do we measure engagement?
Measures Of Engagement For A Blog
Let’s whip out our Google Analytics account using the new interface. Oh look! There’s a link for engagement. Let’s see what that looks like and how Google tells us to measure engagement:
Click for a larger view
According to Google engagement is measured with a few numbers:
- Visit duration – how long someone spends on your site
- Visits
- Pageviews
- Percentage of total (visits / pageviews)
There’s also a view to look at the data by Page Depth, which is the average number of pages on a site that visitors view during a single session:
Click for the larger view
So what Google is telling us to look at, and how many people measure engagement is:
- How long someone spends on your site
- How many times they visit your site
- How many pages they view during a visit
But do these numbers truly tell you how engaged someone is with you and your business?
Let’s go back to our definition which also tells us our goal:
more participation in order to create a meaningful contact or connection with our readers
Perhaps these numbers are telling us what we need to know, but I have a sneaking suspicion that we’re limiting ourselves by looking purely at this set of metrics. Or perhaps blogs limit the ways in which we can create meaningful connections online.
Should we abandon blogs and stick to social media networks, or is there another way? Or are we already doing enough?
What Do You Think?
Does the above set of numbers tell you whether you’re creating a meaningful connection with your blog readers? Are there other metrics you look at to get a better view of engagement?
Let’s talk about it in the comment below.
About Robert DempseyCEO & Founder of Dempsey Marketing, web developer, avid reader, proud father and husband. I get a lot of stuff done.
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I think Google has it partially right on this in terms of using the time on site to determine engagement. However, they are missing a lot of numbers here that makes there engagement theory a little off. First of all, what about comments on blog. I thought that would be the height of engagement, plus when they are measuring social it looks like they are only looking at Twitter. Even there they have my Twitter numbers off. Engagement is a great thing to measure, but we have to measure the entire picture. Andy
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