Consumer Engagement: Are you planning for Offsite and Onsite Engagement?

You may have heard the term Hub and Spoke model of Social Media Engagement where the company website is the hub and the spokes are the various online social networks such as Twitter and Facebook that hang off the website.

Some new research by PostRank has shown the importance of the spoke elements. PostRank  sampled over the top 1000 of the most engaging feeds for the past three years and noted a 30% year over year growth in engagement –- a sign that more people are participating in the social web.

While that figure was not surprising more interesting was the comparison between offsite and onsite engagement illustrated in the chart below showing the enormous increase in offsite engagement.

Also of note was the fact that trackbacks which were the key mean of engaging in conversations were now considerably lower than engagement in chat modes such as Twitter and Facebook. In fact from 2007 to 2009, the contribution of trackbacks to total engagement has dropped from 19% to 3%! In the meantime, channels such as Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook have gone up from less than 1% to over 29%. 

PostRank also examined the lifespan of a story online. In 2007 they noted that  over 94% of all the engagement occurred within the first day of publishing the article.  Now they noted there is a a steady increase in the lifespan of a story down to 83% of total engagement for the first hour in 2008, and 64% in 2009.

Some key takeaways:

• Ensure you have a Social Media Monitoring plan in place to capture those conversations about your company and brand.  To engage offsite you need to know what is being said. Your website analytics are only a small part of the online engagement taking place.
• A Social Media Strategy will enable you to tap into these conversations that are occurring offsite (ie off your website) and get in touch with your customer and future customer base.
• Finally ensure when discussing Social Media Strategy that you look at it wholistically to ensure your Offsite and onsite engagement strategies are working together.

Finally, for some inspiration on engaging offsite view this video with Chris Brogan