Cashing in on engagement
On the rise of engagement, and the benefits and risks of engagement farming
I’ve done a lot of pitches in my time. When I was at Launch PR in the early 2010s, the agency model was to focus on projects, not retainers. It meant we did a hell of a lot of new business - I worked out that for 2012 I did 36 new business meetings, at nearly one a week. Toward the end of that year, we did four pitches in four weeks.
To return to last week’s theme of “double edges”, I love pitches, but the accompanying intensity can be brutal.
And for me, there’s nothing more intense than doing your introduction. I hate them. You have to condense your career highlights into a pithy 1-2 minute summary, while also making it relevant to the client you’re meeting.
It’s too much, too soon, right at the beginning of a pitch. But there’s no other place for them to go - don’t make the mistake of leaving them to the end, as we once did at Launch when pitching to Thorpe Park. Running the pitch deck backwards in honour of the carriage on the Swarm that was switching backwards for the 2013 season didn’t work.
Recently, I’ve taken to referencing Myspace in my intro. I tell people I’ve been doing digital and social media communications for 17 years, before taking them back to summer 2008 when I spent a few weeks identifying creators (we didn’t call them that) on Myspace for a Sony campaign.
Much of that early social landscape is, of course, unrecognisable to the modern world. But the basic principle of that campaign is just as relevant today - attempt to build a groundswell of interest in a product/service (an egg-shaped dancing MP3 player, in this case) by asking people with influence online to showcase it in action. It worked well enough to get us nominated for a few awards.
Looking back at the case study, we mention an uplift in forecasted sales (probably from 1 to 3, but still) and the number of views the videos generated. There’s no mention of engagement. That’s because social media engagement wasn’t really a thing in 2008: retweets were still manual, and the like button was yet to make its debut on Facebook (Feb 2009, in case you’re interested).
We now take engagement for granted as a key indicator of social media popularity. It guides how we devise posts for our social channels and helps provide benchmarks when comparing peers and competitor channels.
But, to paraphrase my colleague Rob Alexander, it’s a “fat word”. It means a million different things to different people. It’s also, as Martin Weigel said back in 2011, “meaningful only when it is specific”.
In the world of social media measurement, we’ve landed in a place where the most commonly accepted definition of engagement is likes, comments and shares.
But even if engagement is useful to track post performance and help inform editorial planning, it still leaves a lot to be desired as a measurement metric. That’s because purely optimising for engagement in the brave new world of 2025 can lead you down some dark pathways. And those dark pathways can end up generating financial returns, making them sadly attractive to many people.
But are the financial returns worth it? The creator economy is notable for how uneven the payouts can be. Leaked Twitch data showed that only the most popular streamers made any serious cash. The CMA’s report into music streaming found that the average payout from DSPs like Spotify was £2k per year. The median number of views for YouTube is 40.
And now we have some new data to add to the mix, as an X “influencer” spoke to the New York Times about how much money he receives from generating engagement on the platform formerly known as Twitter. According to the interview, Dominick McGee has made an average of $55,000 a year from posting right-wing rage-bait posts on X. But in that time, he has also been to the White House, as part of President Trump’s desire to “welcome more people outside traditional news organizations”.
One of the many challenges McGee faces in his career as a creator is a lack of visibility on his funding sources. He doesn’t know how much he’s going to make from X until the money arrives in his bank account. He supports his X revenue with additional revenue streams, such as “exclusive content” for paying subscribers, but for the most part, it’s like waiting for lottery numbers to come in every fortnight.
In the meantime, political posters like McGee keep posting, following the latest vogue-ish ways of “juicing” the algorithm. Posts designed specifically to generate comments (“alley-oops”), recording video podcasts for the express purpose of “clip farming” (30-second out-of-context clips to spark debate) and adopting a “bait and switch” approach to hook new followers with celebrity posts before switching over to politics.
If these tactics sound familiar, it’s because they come from the exact same playbook consultants like me use to advise businesses and CEOs. Comments are gold on most social platforms, so baking in engagement is crucial. You should maximise longer videos by creating shorter social cuts (I don’t ever advocate baiting and switching).
The difference, of course, is the ultimate goal. For creators looking to make money from their posts and build their profile to the point where they can secure more lucrative business offers, the engagement is the goal. And that means doing and saying pretty much anything to generate that engagement.
Now that X is no longer a space for corporate social media activity, and increasingly unsafe for brands, any escalation in the “cash for engagement” race there will have little bearing on most businesses and business leaders’ social activity. But the history of social media platforms shows us that truly innovative platform changes are infrequent (the newsfeed, Stories, purely algorithmic feeds would be my top three).
For the most part, platforms tend to homogenise over time. LinkedIn doesn’t currently offer a creator remuneration scheme, but there are stories of folks on the platform turning their professional influence into cash.
It’s also true that the bar for engagement is much higher than when ‘engagement’ became something people started to care about in 2010. It might still be possible to generate likes from standard media lines, but as the sheer number of people and businesses using LinkedIn keeps increasing, so does the intensity of competition.
Both independent research by Richard van der Blom and our own analysis at Headland found that engagement has dwindled on average over the past twelve months, including for FTSE 100 CEOs. That intensity of competition means focusing more on paid activity, particularly thought leadership adverts, where you can promote individual posts. These perform exponentially well based on our experience.
Or it means mining the engagement-farming playbook for brand-safe ways of generating a reaction. You should consider starting your post strong, with a question, a bold statement or clever wordplay. As with any writing, avoid verbosity - 700-900 characters on LinkedIn is ideal. And design absolutely everything for the small screen. I can’t tell you how many corporate LinkedIn channels I review only to find document uploads and quote card images that are impossible to read on an iPhone.
But ultimately, while the style of posting on social platforms may be unrecognisable from when I started tweeting back in 2008 (strong early Facebook vibes on those posts), the basic principles haven’t changed. If you want people to actively engage with what you’re saying and sharing, make it like a strong pitch introduction: be bright, be interesting and don’t overstay your welcome.