Engagement doesn’t equal sales.

What does that mean?

I’m Rob Anspach, from Anspach Media. Maybe you’ve heard the term engagement. And maybe a lot of people have come to you and said, “It’s all about engagement.”

And when it comes to Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, people are saying the importance of using multiple hashtags to drive engagement is critical. 

Yet, if you’re a local business, driving engagement that doesn’t create local excitement to your business, makes no sense at all.

And it doesn’t drive sales back to your business.

Engagement equaling sales doesn’t work.

Now, if you’re a global business and you want to create audience trust, if you want to increase that engagement throughout the global atmosphere, then using all those hashtags is a great way to get more people into your social network.

But by saying, engagement drive sales, no.

Many of you know me as the owner of Anspach Media. But before I was who I am now, I owned a carpet cleaning business for 20 years. This was before social media. As I built that business through word of mouth (people telling other people), that was what was considered engagement back then, and it was all on a local scale. 

Now we have Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and all these other great, fantastic ways to spread our message. They help with your authority marketing. But if you’re a local business that has no ambition to be global, then for you, creating engagement needs to be on a local scale. So using 30 hashtags that tell people all about you, and trying to get engagement from people outside of your local area, doesn’t make sense.

But those so-called gurus are saying, “Well, Rob, you’re going to get thousands and thousands of fans, and friends, and followers to your Instagram by using 30 hashtags and everything will be right with your business. And you’re going to get sales, and everything’s going to grow, and you’re going to be fantastic and successful.” Pfft!

Okay, so lets use carpet cleaning as an example.

If I’m a local business, whether it be in Lancaster County, whether it be in Chicago, whether it be in Dallas, and I’m creating ads, or posting ads, or posting pictures, or videos on my Instagram, and I’m using 30 hashtags as some of these gurus are telling you to do, my information is going out to Germany, to Australia to Japan. And you might be thinking, “Wow, this is fantastic. I have all these people following me. And I have 100 likes now on this post, and man, my engagement is off the charts.”

How is anybody in Germany, Australia, Japan, or any of these countries going to benefit from your carpet cleaning service in Lancaster County, Dallas, Chicago, wherever it is?

They’re not.

That engagement that you think that you’re getting is crap.

So the reason I’m sharing this with you is that although there are people out there teaching you about engagement, you have to think about who your target audience is.

If your audience is not in Japan, if they’re not in Germany, or Australia, or any of these countries, because you’re a local business, then you have to think locally. You have to enter into your brain that it’s not about the global engagement. It’s about the local excitement that you’re generating to the people around you. It’s about getting your ass out from your computers and your cell phones, and going out there hitting the bricks, introducing yourself, getting referrals, and building your business in a different way.

Social media is great. We teach this stuff every single day to our clients. But when people say engagement equals sales, no, it doesn’t.

Because honestly, you can’t take all those likes to the bank.

If you want to learn more about authority broadcasting and how you can benefit from what we do here at Anspach Media, click here to “get started.”