We’ve come full circle. We’re returning to social media engagement. As I daily peruse the social media sphere and the lists of bloggers who still write daily, good for you, I am conscious of one thing in this chaos of disruption.

Human engagement with connectivity remains the number one most important metric of social media.

Says Social Media Explorer today (exact quotes) by Peter Friedman:

1. ‘Large fan numbers alone rarely contribute to a tangible impact on your bottom line.
2. ‘Just building up fan numbers doesn’t create engagement or sustain it.
3. ‘The real business goal is engagement.’
4. ‘Engagement impacts business, not fan numbers. As such, a smaller number of fans with more engagement are more valuable than a large number of fans with small engagement.’

I couldn’t agree more, and I use my client, Alan’s Collision Center, as an example of the numbers misunderstanding. When a business owner still believes that the quantity of Facebook ‘likes’ to its business page resonates loudest, it’s up to us to reeducate and rechannel that knowledge into social media engagement.

When a blog post, image and thread of conversation gets engagement from the fans, that means a brand is getting more attention, more involvement, and more loyalty. That all equals engagement.

We Live In A Social Media Data World

It’s challenging as a marketer today. I feel it every day. And, my friend Mark Schaefer informs us of this eloquently in his blog post today, too.

We dance around the data trying to get it, attempting to interpret it, and then further attempting to put it into action and be all smart about it. We need that data to tell us something, but if a Facebook ‘like’ isn’t the right piece of data to measure, what is?

You may like my recent podcast on neuromarketing with my co-host John Gregory Olson. We do The Heart Of Marketing weekly on iTunes and Stitcher (subscribe, rate, review, please?). I actually believe, initially, that this latest trend on human behavior and action as it relates to brands and marketing is a crock. But, is it?

If the leaders in the field are telling us that we’re heading back to the pre-Great Recession era of engagement, then let’s have a party on Twitter and blog comments again. This week, I actually commented on my first blog in over a year, and, boy, did that feel good. Amazingly, three of us – Hessie Jones, author of Evolve—Marketing Is Doomed and Danny Sullivan, an extraordinary A-lister in the sector (oops, should I retract that title?) each contributed a few things. It was almost shades of 2009.

Is Neuromarketing The Next Big Thing?

Do take a listen to this episode as it may be food for thought as you determine how to ramp up your engagement with humans, who are also your customers and prospects and peers and clients.