Community engagement

This link confirms my biases:

Community isn’t social media. Nobody joins your community for engagement. They join looking for support, or connections, to give back, or find meaningful relationships. Engagement is just the mechanism for delivering something of value, it’s not the value itself.

This is precisely why it’s become the primary community metric: it’s quantifiable. More than that, it’s *easily* quantifiable. You just count the number of posts, or comments, or likes, or page views you’re getting. It doesn’t matter what’s actually in them, only that they exist. But the fact that they exist isn’t valuable to you. And it’s not valuable to your community either.

Engagement metrics are useless. They have no reflection on the actual “experience” with the product. Social Media is mostly an algorithmic driven model supported by advertising. The more users stay on the platform, the more “engagement metrics” you are likely to encounter. It transpires that negative news has better engagement, leading to toxic cesspools, especially on Twitter. I find it odd that companies rely on Facebook (and their attempts to extort money in the name of “advertising” and “reach”) for “customer engagement”, wherein you might just have an entire army of bots following you.

Social media is a waste of time and money. Its highly inefficient medium to “grow your audience”.