Engagement in social is defined as interactions between users, typically involving a conversation. These interactions can involve anything from threaded conversations, acknowledgements to sharing thoughts.

Over the years, we’ve seen social devolve where in many cases, we’ve lost sight in the original objectives of social being focused around the conversations to support our objectives to simply publishing content on digital platforms (passive publishing). To ensure we’re focusing on what made social stand out was the conversation, so here are the fundamentals to creating relevant conversations.

• Why – Aligning on goals first where you communicate where you are heading and seek to identify others’ goals as a way to connect.
• Who – Understanding who your target audience is in terms age, demographic, background, interests, motivations.
• What – Once you know more about your target audience, you will begin to piece together what they want to discuss and most importantly, where they don’t want to spend their time.
• Where – Defining the conversation allows to understand where these conversations take place and how to bring the conversations to an environment that will best facilitate a conversation to allow the relationship to develop.
• When – Timing is everything except when it is not. Always understand the cadence of communication as frequency keeps the conversation moving, but only at the most appropriate times when the other user is able to be in receipt and acknowledge the conversation.

The focus of driving engagement is to continually refine and repeat the fundamentals to ensure conversations can continue to support the development of the relationships.