It’s Not All About Engagement

If you spend much time on G+ you’ll prob­a­bly get exposed to the con­cept of engage­ment. There are some very promi­nent peo­ple who seem obsessed with it.

The notion has taken root that if you should fol­low the peo­ple who have high engage­ment on their posts. And that if you want to be suc­cess­ful you must have high engagement.

This is frankly utter crap. In fact if you look at the list of G+ users ranked by Engage­ment you dis­cover a num­ber of inter­est­ing things.

The first is that you don’t need to have a large num­ber of fol­low­ers to have a high engage­ment score. In fact there are peo­ple with far less fol­low­ers than me who score in the top 100 com­pared to my  fee­ble 2,811 rank­ing. Fur­ther proof that most of my fol­low­ers are essen­tially zom­bies and I’d be bet­ter off with­out them.

Peo­ple with high engage­ment scores do not nec­es­sar­ily engage a lot them­selves. Some do. Some barely do any com­ments beyond the ini­tial post.

High engage­ment does not equal qual­ity com­ment­ing. And in many cases (not all)  the inter­est­ing com­ments get drowned out by the rest.

Pop­u­lar­ity Contest

So a high engage­ment rank­ing doesn’t tell you who has inter­est­ing posts, it doesn’t tell you who actively responds and it doesn’t tell you who has an inter­est­ing com­mu­nity of peo­ple around them.

In fact all it is is a vari­a­tion on the fol­lower num­bers pop­u­lar­ity con­test replac­ing fol­low­ers with com­ments and pluses

These are most def­i­nitely not The Best of the Best. They’re the pop­u­lar kids. And if that’s your def­i­n­i­tion of suc­cess go for it. It’s not mine.

Embed­ded Link

The Top Google Plus users ranked by Engage­ment
The list ranks those peo­ple on Google Plus who have the high­est engage­ment on their posts. Engage­ment here is defined as the num­ber of com­ments, shares, and plus ones on their posts com­bined with the …

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