Why Most Brands Misread Social Media Engagement
Table of Contents
Social media engagement is one of the most misunderstood metrics in marketing.
Most brands treat engagement as a scorecard. More likes, comments, shares, and saves mean success. Fewer interactions mean something is wrong.
That assumption creates a problem.
When engagement drops, teams often focus on the visible symptoms. Content gets reworked. Posting schedules change. New tactics are tested. Someone inevitably blames the algorithm.
But what if engagement isn’t the problem?
What if it’s the result?
The final stage of the CARE Framework challenges the way most organizations think about social media engagement. Rather than treating engagement as a goal to pursue, CARE treats it as the outcome of something deeper.
Conversations build trust. Acquisition interactions create confidence. Retention efforts strengthen relationships. When those three elements work together, engagement follows.
That’s why meaningful social media engagement isn’t something you generate.
It’s something you earn.
The Engagement Mistake Most Brands Make
One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is treating social media engagement as an isolated metric.
When a post performs well, the natural response is to ask what worked and how to repeat it. When engagement falls short of expectations, teams often assume the content missed the mark, the timing was wrong, or the algorithm changed.
While those factors can influence performance, they rarely tell the whole story.
Engagement doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every comment, question, reply, and conversation is influenced by the relationship customers have with a brand long before they encounter a particular post.
That’s why two organizations can publish similar content and see dramatically different results. One has spent time building trust through conversations, responding to customer concerns, and showing up consistently when people engage. The other has focused primarily on publishing content.
The difference isn’t necessarily the post itself.
The difference is everything that happened before the post.
Meaningful social media engagement is rarely created by a single piece of content. More often, it reflects the strength of the relationship that already exists between a brand and its audience.
Why Engagement Starts with Conversations
The first step in the CARE Framework is Conversations, and it’s often the step organizations skip.
Content gets published. Metrics get tracked. Reports get generated. Yet many brands spend very little time actually participating in the conversations happening around their content.
That matters because relationships are built through interaction, not distribution.
In our article on conversations, we explored why broadcasting alone rarely creates meaningful relationships. Trust begins to develop when customers receive answers, when feedback is acknowledged, and when participation feels worthwhile.
Over time, those small interactions send a powerful message: someone is paying attention.
Without that foundation, meaningful social media engagement becomes difficult to achieve because there is no relationship supporting it.
How Acquisition Signals Build Trust
The second stage of CARE focuses on Acquisition, and this is where many organizations miss valuable opportunities to build trust.
Most buying decisions begin long before a customer fills out a form or speaks with a salesperson. Questions start to surface. Prospective customers compare options, evaluate risk, look for reassurance, and try to determine whether a solution is right for them. Increasingly, those conversations happen in public on social media.
Organizations that recognize these acquisition signals can participate in the decision-making process long before a purchase occurs. Instead of immediately promoting a product or service, they answer questions, provide clarity, and help people move forward with confidence.
That approach creates a very different customer experience.
When people feel heard and supported during the buying journey, they begin to view the brand as a trusted resource rather than just another company trying to make a sale. Over time, that trust makes future conversations easier. Customers become more willing to ask questions, share opinions, and engage with content because they already know what to expect when they interact with the brand.
That’s why acquisition isn’t just about identifying potential buyers. It’s about building the trust that eventually leads to meaningful social media engagement.
How Retention Creates Better Engagement
The third stage of CARE focuses on Retention, and this is where organizations demonstrate whether they are truly committed to the relationship.
Many brands don’t discover retention problems until a complaint escalates, a customer stops buying, or negative feedback becomes impossible to ignore. By that point, trust has often been damaged and the relationship is already under strain.
The CARE Framework takes a different approach. Rather than waiting for customers to leave, it encourages organizations to pay attention to the signals that appear earlier in the journey. Frustration, confusion, unmet expectations, and recurring concerns often surface in conversations long before a customer decides to walk away.
Organizations that listen carefully have an opportunity to respond before those small issues become larger problems. Questions can be answered. Concerns can be addressed. Friction can be reduced.
Those moments matter because every interaction sends a message about the relationship.
When customers see that feedback is acknowledged and problems are taken seriously, trust deepens. Over time, that trust makes future conversations easier and more productive. Customers become more willing to share their experiences, ask questions, and participate in discussions because they believe their voice matters.
That’s why retention isn’t just about preventing churn. It’s about strengthening relationships. And stronger relationships naturally lead to more meaningful social media engagement.
Why Social Media Engagement Is the Outcome
This is where many organizations get the sequence backwards.
Because engagement is visible, it’s often treated as the starting point. Teams look at likes, comments, shares, and saves and assume those metrics are the thing they need to improve. As a result, they spend enormous amounts of time trying to increase engagement without addressing the factors that influence it in the first place.
The CARE Framework takes a different view.
Rather than treating social media engagement as the objective, CARE treats it as the result of work happening elsewhere. Meaningful engagement emerges when customers trust the relationship enough to participate.
That trust is built through conversations. It grows when organizations respond to acquisition signals with helpful answers instead of sales pitches. It deepens when customer concerns are acknowledged and retention issues are addressed before they become larger problems.
By the time engagement appears, the most important work has already happened.
Customers are commenting because they expect someone will respond. They are asking questions because they believe their questions matter. They are sharing opinions and experiences because previous interactions have shown them that participation is worthwhile.
That’s why meaningful social media engagement should never be viewed as a vanity metric. It is evidence that customers feel comfortable interacting with your brand.
As Brooke Sellas explains:
“Meaningful engagement isn’t something you chase. It’s something you earn.”
When organizations understand that distinction, they stop focusing exclusively on the number itself and begin focusing on the behaviors that create it. The goal is no longer to manufacture engagement. The goal is to create the conditions where engagement happens naturally.
The CARE Flywheel
One of the most important ideas in the CARE Framework is that it isn’t a checklist of activities to complete.
It’s a flywheel.
Many organizations approach social media as a series of disconnected campaigns. They publish content, measure the results, and then start over again with the next campaign. Success depends on constantly creating something new.
The CARE Framework works differently.
Every conversation creates an opportunity to learn. Every acquisition signal provides insight into what customers need before they buy. Every retention signal reveals friction that can be addressed before a relationship is damaged. As organizations respond to those signals, trust grows.
That trust encourages more participation.
Customers become more willing to ask questions, share experiences, provide feedback, and engage in conversations. Those interactions create even more opportunities to learn about customer needs, concerns, and expectations.
Over time, the process becomes self-reinforcing.
The organization gains a deeper understanding of its customers. Customer experiences improve because decisions are informed by real conversations. As experiences improve, trust grows stronger. Stronger trust leads to more engagement, more conversations, and more opportunities to gather insight.
That’s why the CARE Framework functions as a flywheel rather than a checklist. Each stage strengthens the next, creating momentum that builds over time.
Instead of relying on individual campaigns to generate results, organizations create a system that becomes more valuable with every customer interaction.
What Social Media Engagement Is Actually Telling You
When most organizations review social media engagement, the conversation usually centers on performance.
The discussion tends to focus on whether a post generated enough comments, whether engagement increased compared to the previous month, or whether the content performed as expected.
Those questions aren’t necessarily wrong, but they often focus attention on the outcome rather than the information hidden inside it.
A more valuable question is:
What are customers trying to tell us?
Every comment, question, and conversation contains context. Customers reveal what they care about, what frustrates them, what they don’t understand, and what they need to move forward. They share buying concerns, product feedback, service issues, and expectations—often without being asked.
Most organizations spend significant resources trying to gather this type of information through surveys, focus groups, and research initiatives. Meanwhile, those same insights are frequently being shared in public conversations every day.
That’s what makes social media engagement so valuable.
The real opportunity isn’t the metric itself. It’s the understanding that comes from the interactions behind it.
Viewed through the CARE Framework, engagement becomes more than a measure of performance. It becomes evidence that customers trust the relationship enough to participate in it. And every time they do, organizations gain another opportunity to learn.
The stronger those relationships become, the more willing customers are to share their experiences, concerns, and perspectives. Over time, those conversations create a clearer picture of what customers actually need and what organizations can do to serve them better.
That’s why social media engagement is one of the most valuable outcomes of the CARE Framework. It doesn’t just tell you that customers are paying attention.
It tells you they’re willing to talk.
Building a Social Strategy Around CARE
The brands winning on social media today are not necessarily the ones publishing the most content or chasing the latest platform trends.
More often, they’re the organizations that have learned how to build and strengthen relationships at scale.
That starts with conversations. Not because conversations are the goal, but because they create opportunities to understand customers. Acquisition signals reveal what people need before they buy. Retention signals expose friction before it becomes churn. Together, those interactions help organizations build trust over time.
Once that trust exists, engagement begins to look different.
Customers ask questions because they expect answers. They share feedback because they believe someone is listening. They participate in conversations because previous interactions have shown them that their voice matters.
That’s the lesson at the heart of the CARE Framework.
Meaningful social media engagement is not something organizations create through better content alone. It emerges when Conversations, Acquisition, and Retention are working together as part of a larger system.
In that sense, engagement isn’t the first step in the customer relationship.
It’s proof that the relationship is already growing.
And that’s what makes it so valuable.
Ready to Build Your CARE System?
If you’re ready to turn conversations into business intelligence, identify acquisition and retention signals, and create a social strategy built around measurable business outcomes, the CARE Blueprint can help.
The course walks you through the entire CARE Framework, including conversation coding, acquisition and retention signal tagging, engagement analysis, and ROI measurement.
Use code SMCX for 50% off and get access for just $48.
Because engagement isn’t something you chase.
It’s something you earn.
Read the Transcript
[00:00:00] Wrapping Up the CARE Framework
Here’s the thing about engagement. Most brands are measuring engagement on social media wrong. Yes, I said it. And I say it because they’re looking at that number, likes, comments, shares, saves, and they’re making a judgment. And usually that judgment looks like high number, good, low number, bad.
Hey, hey, and welcome back to the Social Media CX Show. I’m your host, Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media, author of Conversations That Connect, and today I’m closing out two of the most important months of content we have ever produced on this show. No pressure. This is week four of our June C.A.R.E. series, and before I get into it, I just want to take a second to acknowledge what we’ve built together over the past eight [00:01:00] weeks.
In May, we spent four weeks going deep on the Social Penetration Theory, also called the Onion Theory, which is a 1973 relationship framework that explains, better than almost anything else I’ve found, why some brands build real lasting communities on social media, while others continue to shout into the void with cliches and facts.
While the brands that are doing it right are using more opinions and feelings. We did four layers in four weeks, cliches, facts, opinions, feelings with one through line throughout, the deeper the conversation, the deeper the trust. Then this month, June 2026, we’ve built on top of that foundation with our CARE framework.
CARE stands for conversations, acquisition tagging, retention tagging, and today we get to the E, which is [00:02:00] engagement.
[00:02:00] The Engagement Mistake Most Brands Make
Now, I know what some of you are thinking, which is, “Brooke, engagement is a vanity metric. Likes don’t pay the bills.” I’ve said this before, you’ve heard this before, and I totally hear you. But I want you to hang in there because what I’m about to tell you about engagement might change your mind completely.
Here’s the thing about engagement. Most brands are measuring engagement on social media wrong. Yes, I said it. And I say it because they’re looking at that number, likes, comments, shares, saves, and they’re making a judgment. And usually that judgment looks like high number, good, low number, bad. And when the number is low, they start to panic, so they are boosting the post.
They’re changing the content. They’re chasing the algorithm. But what they almost never do is look at what the [00:03:00] engagement is actually saying. Here’s what we see across every client we’ve ever worked with. Meaningful engagement, the kind that actually moves the needle, doesn’t just happen. It’s being earned.
It’s being trained into how that social team manages content and the conversations that content produces. Hopefully, it’s producing conversations. And it’s the result of everything that comes before it.
[00:03:28] Why Trust Comes Before Engagement
So when you focus on the C in CARE, conversations, when you show up in the comment section, when you ask real questions, when your content aims to get people to converse with you, when you respond to every single person who takes the time to talk to you on social media, something shifts.
Your audience learns that you’re listening, that it feels like a safe place, that they feel like they belong. When you’re tagging acquisition [00:04:00] signals in those conversations and responding to those pre-purchase questions with genuine, helpful answers, your audience is learning that not only are you listening, but that you’re knowledgeable. That you wanna help, that they can rely on you.
When you’re catching retention risks early, hopefully, and resolving that friction or that churn before things escalate, your audience learns that you’re trustworthy, that you care, that you actually want to solve their problems. And when your audience knows that you’re listening, that you’re knowledgeable, that you’re trustworthy, they talk to you.
Not just liking, not just saving, actually conversing with you through your social media content on your social media channels. You’re creating comment threads. You’re creating real questions. You’re getting real opinions, disagreements, stories. That kind of engagement is what the algorithms reward because it signals that [00:05:00] something real is happening.
That kind of engagement that when you tag it correctly, you code it correctly, you do all of the things we’ve been talking about, it does stop being a vanity metric. And it really becomes one of the richest data sources that you have, or what we call social intelligence.
[00:05:21] The CARE Flywheel Explained
Now, I want to introduce a concept that I think reframes everything we’ve talked about this month, which is that CARE, conversations, acquisition, retention, engagement, isn’t a checklist.
It’s really a flywheel, and here’s how that works. When you focus on the C, conversations in care, really focus, not just scheduling posts and hoping, you start building that foundation of trust. Your audience starts to begin to feel safe engaging with you.
[00:05:50] When Customers Start Opening Up
They’re answering your questions. They’re asking their questions. They’re sharing opinions and feelings. They tell you things they wouldn’t tell you probably in a survey or a paid [00:06:00] focus group. That, those conversations, start to feed you the acquisition signals. Real ones. The ones where people are telling you, “Hey, I’m considering buying this,” or, “Hey, I don’t know if I want to buy…”
Like they’re telling you what’s holding them back. They’re telling them what would push them over the edge. “Do you have any discounts? Can you offer free shipping,” right? This is real voice of customer feedback on acquisition. And then at the same time, retention is also happening. People feel comfortable telling you where the friction is.
They probably feel comfortable doing that anyway, but they get more comfortable, and maybe the edge or the sting comes out because they know they can go to you, and you’re actually going to listen and respond. So they’re gonna tell you, “Hey, I’m frustrated. Here’s what I’m thinking. Here’s why I’m thinking about leaving.”
And when you handle all of that, the C, the A, and the R, when you respond, when you resolve, and when you show up consistently, something remarkable happens. Engagement gets easier. It gets [00:07:00] deeper. Because in the way that you’ve been looking at CARE, conversations, acquisition, retention, you’ve been training your audience that you’re vulnerable.
We’ve been talking about that vulnerability piece and how it’s hard for brands to do. Systematize it. Use the CARE framework because that is how you show that you’re vulnerable, that you’re human, that you actually care what they think. And then they start being, your customers and would-be customers- vulnerable back. And if that sounds familiar, it should because that is the social penetration theory, the onion theory, SPT we call it, all kinds of things around here, in action.
So May and June are really the same philosophy. They just have a little bit of different frameworks or the way to approach them. But the bottom line is the deeper the conversations, the deeper the trust. The deeper the trust, the more meaningful [00:08:00] engagement. The more meaningful engagement, the more conversations.
Now you’re starting to see the flywheel, right? The more conversations, the more you get to tag. The more that you tag, the more you code, the more you label, the better your data, and round and round the flywheel goes. Every rotation makes the whole thing faster, stronger, and more valuable, not just to you, but to your customers and would-be customers.
[00:08:29] What Algorithms Actually Reward
I want to spend just a minute on the algorithm side of this because it matters, too. But every social, major social media platform right now in the year June 2026, is optimizing for one thing above everything else. They optimize for a lot of things, but there’s one thing above everything else that they all optimize for: meaningful interaction.
Not reach, not impressions, not amount how many times, you know, somebody liked something or became a [00:09:00] follower. It’s how long did they stop? Did you stop the scroll? Did they comment? Did someone answer or reply to that comment? Did a comment thread form, right? Major engagement or meaningful engagement looks like that.
So when CARE is working, when C-A-R has done its job, and your audience is genuinely engaged, the algorithm notices. It rewards you. It’s going to amplify your content to more people. More people means more conversations. More conversations mean more tagging opportunities. More tagging means better acquisition and retention data.
Better data or social intelligence means smarter content and care decisions. Which means, you guessed it, even better engagement. The flywheel keeps spinning. The [00:10:00] beautiful part here is that you’re not paying for any of this. This is not paid media, where the minute you stop paying in, those results stop coming in.
This is organic. You earned it, one conversation at a time.
I started May by telling you about this 1973 theory that I wrote my undergraduate thesis on, which was the Social Penetration Theory. Altman and Taylor, the two social psychologists, and we went through the Onion Model of human relationships. I told you that I built my entire agency and my entire philosophy around one central idea from that theory, and that is that relationships deepen through conversation. Not through content, not through campaigns, through real dialogue.
And I also told you that think conversation, not campaign isn’t just a tagline. It really is our operating system at B Squared Media. Eight weeks later, I [00:11:00] hope you still feel that because CARE is the SPT applied to business. The C is the cliche layer broken open; real conversations instead of scheduled noise.
The A, or acquisition, is facts made actionable, right? The data that tells you who’s ready to buy. The R in retention is opinions and feelings being honored; catching those frictions or churn signals before someone leaves. And E, engagement, is what happens when all of that compounds; your audience trusting you enough to show up, to talk back, to be vulnerable because you showed them first that you were all of those things.
Y’all, that’s the whole game. I literally just gave you all my [00:12:00] IP. Please go do something amazing with it.
[00:12:04] Turning CARE Into a Business System
If this series is lighting you up, if you’re sitting there thinking, “I need to build this system for my organization,” the CARE blueprint is exactly where to start. I want you to go check out the course I built, which teaches you everything we’ve covered this month about care… how to set up your conversation coding, how to tag acquisition and retention signals, how to turn engagement from a vanity metric into a data engine or a flywheel, how to build the ROI case that finally makes social care make sense to the people who hold your budget within your company.
You can find the course at courses.bsquared.media/courses/care, or way easier, wherever you’re watching or listening to this, just run to the transcript or the show notes [00:13:00] on that platform, and you’ll see a link to the course there. And if you use the code SMCX, like the name of this podcast, at checkout, you will get 50% off of the course, which will bring it down to just $48.
For the system that ties SPT and CARE together into a complete social strategy built around trust, loyalty, and measurable business outcomes, $48 sounds pretty darn good. I mean, come on. I spend $48 on coffee, I feel like, these days.
Anyways, I’m so proud of what we’ve all built together over these eight weeks.
May taught you the theory. June has given you the framework. You now truly have everything you need to go build something real with your social media channels and strategy. I [00:14:00] don’t want you to be louder. I don’t want you to do more. It’s not about adding another platform. It’s really not even about being faster.
Yes, we want to get faster with our replies, but it’s really just about doing the deep work. We need to go deeper because I promise you, the brands that are winning on social right now, and the ones who will continue to win, are not the ones who are posting the most. They’ve gotten off the content hamster wheel.
They are the ones who are trying to connect the best through these conversations. So I want you to go build that CARE flywheel that we just talked about this month.
As always, if this show has been helping you think differently about customer experience, social media, how to get return investment out of social media, crazy 1973 weird named communication theories, please go rate and review us.
It will totally make my day. It [00:15:00] also helps us bring on more brilliant voices and keeps the community growing with intention, which is important because next month, y’all, the entire month of July in 2026 is dedicated to artificial intelligence, AI, and social media. I have a ton of amazing guests who will be coming on, so you won’t have to listen to me drone on about it.
So stay tuned, and until next time, think conversation, not campaign.
Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to the Social Media CX Podcast on YouTube. And if your team is thinking about what responsible social listening in banking or financial services actually looks like at scale, check out the State of Social Care Report 2026.
Finally, as always, Think conversation, not campaign.™
Latest posts by Brooke B. Sellas (See All)
- Why Most Brands Misread Social Media Engagement - June 24, 2026
- The Churn Signals Hidden in Customer Complaints - June 17, 2026
- The Revenue Opportunity Hiding in Customer Conversations - June 10, 2026
Written by award-winning strategist Brooke Sellas, this weekly 5-minute power-up will help you turn social interactions into loyalty, retention, and revenue.
Written by award-winning strategist Brooke Sellas, this weekly 5-minute power-up will help you turn social interactions into loyalty, retention, and revenue.
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