I often experiment to see if I am right, and I am 99% right. In this case I am talking about social media engagement.

If you meet someone in a coffee shop, or restaurant, do you sit there silently eating, looking at each other, but saying nothing? If your answer is yes may I ask why that is?

Social media is real life in fast forward mode, you can connect to many more people at the same time and you can converse with them as I hope you would do face to face, at an in person meeting.

Recently I had back to back travel, very little time to connect on line and I was concentrating on my presentation for a conference in Oregon. Normally my admin in the UK sets up automatic tweets as an example but she has been sick so I had every intention of taking care of this chore before I left for the States. Due to time I had no chance to set up any of the automated social media stuff so I decided to check out if I was still right about engaging on Social Media.

After returning to Canada I noticed something that proved I was right, without any engagement from me at all my social media platforms were very quiet. People were connecting to me but no chat was taking place, apart from a few spam comments which I disregard.

I quickly jumped back into action and started engaging with my long time and new connections and this is when I realized, again, how many people fail to treat their online connections as ‘real people.  People collect online connections as trophies to showcase and hope others think they are successful online, which they are not of course!

Engagement in every sense of the word is very important face to face and online, otherwise go hide in a cupboard, put headphones on and turn off your computer, because no one wants to be ignored.