What social lurking means for your brand
What social lurking means for your brand

By on in Tech & Trends

What social lurking means for your brand

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You open up the Instagram app. As you scroll through your feed, you take note of posts from friends and acquaintances, but you don’t comment on anything. Perhaps you like a cat video or post from a meme account.

You open up Stories and half-watch them as you glance absentmindedly between your phone and computer screen. If you were to flick over to your own Instagram profile, you’d notice that your last post was from two months ago.

That’s social lurking, and it’s becoming a trend across social media platforms. Users are still logging on to their regular apps, but they’re not doing much. Their interactions with content are incredibly shallow (or perhaps even nonexistent). Nearly 50% of X users post less than five times a month, while Instagram engagement dropped 30% in 2023.

The phenomenon is most pronounced among millennials. Maybe it’s because we’re in the time of our lives when many of us are busy raising young kids. Perhaps it’s because we remember the halcyon days of the early internet and dislike what it’s become.

Whatever the case, we’ve gone silent but just can’t seem to quit the platforms altogether.

As fascinating as I find lurking from a sociological perspective, it’s also a shift with major marketing implications.

 

The marketer’s dilemma inherent in social lurking

If you manage social for your brand, you know that metrics matter. You track things like engagement and follower count. But how can you measure the success of your social efforts when people simply aren’t deeply engaging with any content?

And, perhaps even more importantly, does a lack of engagement mean a lack of interest? Or are people passively viewing your content and still making purchase decisions based on it?

Finally, if you want to become one of the rare brands that can actually cultivate a community on social, how do you do that in a lurker-filled world?

 


If you want to become one of the rare brands that can actually cultivate a community on social, how do you do that in a lurker-filled world?

 

Rethinking how you measure social success

When the world’s changed around you, you can’t rely on old measures to gauge your success.

First, reassess your benchmarks. With engagement down everywhere, you can’t compare your 2024 numbers to those from 2019. Instead, shorten your timelines (think month-over-month, not year-over-year) and keep an eye on marketing news. If there are larger shifts in user behavior across social media, factor those into how you assess your audience’s interactions with your brand.

Next, revisit your social-specific KPIs. They probably meant something when you first defined them, but are they still telling you anything meaningful? If not, time to toss them. As you recalibrate to a lower-engagement world, keep an eye out for other patterns that might point you toward replacement KPIs that will provide actionable insights.

Something like social share of voice, which measures how often users mention you as compared to your competitors, might be a more useful metric than raw engagement numbers like total comments or likes on your posts.

Then, expand your view beyond social media. Do you have a way to track your audience along their entire journey with your brand? It’s getting tougher in a cookieless world, but there are still ways to understand how someone behaves across your digital properties.

If your engagement on social is down, but those same individuals are eventually landing on your e-commerce store and hitting “buy,” that’s valuable information to have!

 

The new gold standard for engagement: community-building

If you do want to win on social, part of redefining success is rethinking how you use the platform. When posting regularly begins to feel more like shouting into the void, what can you do to reintroduce social interactions into social media?

Establishing your own community may be the antidote to lurking. When you create a space that genuinely feels welcoming and invites participation, you may discover that people are eager to engage.

Unlike those declining engagement rates on the public side of social media, community groups are thriving. Nearly a quarter of social media users report actively participating in online communities within the previous three months, while the popular chat app Discord boasted 154 monthly active users in 2023.

Anecdotally, the sole reason I maintain my Facebook account is to access a group for content marketers. It’s a thriving community where people support each other with advice and best practices, and it’s a reminder that the early promise of social media can be realized.

It’s also a lot of work for admins. Managing an online community means facilitating conversations, mitigating conflict, and keeping everyone engaged; it’s a significant time commitment.

So, while creating a community tied in with your brand can pay dividends, it is no easy lift or instant solution. This is about the long game.

 

Ready to invest in a strategy to reinvigorate your social media marketing? We can help.