What engagement really is

Read time: 3 minutes

When I became active on LinkedIn a year ago, my routine used to look like that:

Post. Pray for some comments. Be ecstatic when a few people took their time of the day to comment on the post.

Repeat every day.

My engagement kept rising. Heck, I was even getting inbound leads.

All this dried up after a few rounds of LinkedIn reducing organic reach.

My previous strategy of high reach and effortless inbound wasn’t working anymore. I had to change things up.

I rolled my sleeves, looked at the data and started thinking what I could change to make up for the reduced distribution. And then it dawned on me:

Distribution is driven by engagement. Then, the question begs — what drives engagement?

The answer is — engagement. Excuse the tautology, but it’s true. If you give engagement, you’ll get engagement.

But this isn’t a quid pro quo game. People always know when you comment for the sake of commenting. There’s something deeper than that…

It feels good to see comments pouring on your content.

And yes, it’s also a metric that gauges a couple of important aspects:

• Is your content well-written?

• Is your network active?

• Are people finding your ideas resonating or at least thought-provoking?

(And the answers to these questions can help you adjust your content strategy.)

But engagement has a much bigger role than that.

It’s a shortcut to meeting people.

I was a fool back in my early days. Instead of engaging back on my comments and calling it a day, I should have followed up with everyone in that comment section who seemed relevant and interesting.

Comments are simply a gateway to conversations.

I know, I know - commenting is way easier than chatting with people.

As an introvert, I still find it hard to be as outgoing as I need to be.

In a way, this is like making working out a habit—it’s hard in the beginning and it’s uncomfortable (especially if you’re a couch potato). But it’s so worth it in the long run.

This is also the reason behind a very sad fact: the majority of LinkedIn “creators” aren’t successful in making the platform their main bread and butter.

They get stuck in a rat race of scraping the barrel for content ideas, posting around the clock, and spending hours aimlessly engaging with every John and Jane.

And the shocking part is some do this for years despite realising it’s not bringing them the results they want.

This is a hard pill to swallow:

And I’m not talking about just selling your services or your products.

There’s also strategic partnerships, building a referral network, knowledge exchange.

One of the biggest lies of the solopreneur movement is that you can do it on your own.

Having a business is hard. Having a business all on your own is nearly impossible.

The one thing that alleviates all that hardship is having a highly active network and dozens of warm relationships with different people. They may turn to friends or partners.

In any case, engagement in the form of comments is your first gateway to meeting these people.

Go meet them!