Shift Happens - Onsite vs Offsite Engagement

Smart companies consistently monitor the success of their social networking and social media investments. In the past many of us relied on the metrics of trackbacks, comments, forum posts and other onsite interactions to determine the level of engagement we have with our online community. Over the past 3 years there has been a noticeable shift in these numbers. For many companies and content publishers the drop has been in excess of 50%. PostRank has recently completed research that indicates that while onsite engagement is down offsite has jumped by over 30%.

So where are the conversations going and is this necessarily a bad thing? As you may suspect Twitter, Digg, Facebook and all the rest of the major social platforms are hosting your readers and the conversations that used to go with them. This may equate to a loss of traffic but I don't think it equals a loss of engagement. It does however shed light on the need to expand your analytic scope with regards to engagement. The days of relying solely on your website analytics is fading into the sunset. Companies that are serious about seeing the entire landscape need to monitor the offsite conversations and participate on multiple platforms to achieve the engagement goals they have set. 

I'd urge you to take a quick test drive of a couple of the leading social monitoring tools and see how much of the conversation you have been missing out on.