The engagement pyramid is a simple yet powerful PR model.
We all care about our interests … to a degree.
You should be happy to get 1% to offer their engagement as creators. However, to launch a successful social media campaign, you must also attract contributors and lurkers—even if you can’t expect them to invest as much engagement as your top creators.
How do you raise the engagement bar for your campaign?
The Engagement Pyramid
The engagement pyramid divides publics into three distinct groups:
Engaged publics typically distribute themselves according to a distribution that has been scientifically proven well before the advent of the internet and social media, and supporting sociologists have made observations for centuries. 1The 1% rule of online engagement is an urban legend on the internet, but a peer-reviewed paper from 2014 entitled “The 1% Rule in Four Digital Health Social Networks: An Observational … Continue reading
What you ask of your contributors must be considerably smaller (small ask) than what you ask of the creators (big ask).
Example: If we ask creators to upload their best summer pictures for a social media campaign, maybe contributors can suggest creative captions for their favourite pictures? Now, if both creators and contributors are having their fair share of fun, why not invite lurkers to vote on their favourite photos and captions?
When studying internet forums specifically, it’s not uncommon to find that 90% of users have never posted, 9% are adding to comments, but only to existing topics and threads (contributors), and 1% are actively starting new subjects and threads.
Your Identities and Roles
The 1% rule (or the 1-9-90 rule) is a rule of thumb and shouldn’t be applied to broad demographic populations but rather to publics, i.e. situational interest groups.
We all belong to various interest groups—and our engagement in each varies.
Online engagement relies on the dynamics of special interest groups of like-minded people. Coincidentally, bringing such like-minded people together is something that the internet does very efficiently.
For instance:
I’ve used the engagement pyramid many times to explain how to harness maximum online engagement and why it’s crucial to attract clearly defined special interest groups.
How To Increase Social Engagement
The engagement pyramid hints as to why social sites like Facebook are powerful agents of social engagement:
So, how can your brand increase online engagement? Make sure that your campaigns cater to creators, contributors, and lurkers alike. If you fail to activate even one of these, your whole campaign could bust.
FOOTNOTES
| 1 | The 1% rule of online engagement is an urban legend on the internet, but a peer-reviewed paper from 2014 entitled “The 1% Rule in Four Digital Health Social Networks: An Observational Study” confirmed the 1% rule of thumb. |
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| 2 | Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance from 1957 explains why handling contradictory information is psychologically challenging. Festinger’s theory on cognitive dissonance and his theory on social comparison are two of the most influential theories in the history of social psychology. |
