Are These Really The Top Social Networks Based On Engagement?

Jeremy Liew over at Lightspeed Ventures had an interesting post today titled, “Top Social Networks For Engagement” where he proceeds to list out of the top social networks in rank of engagement. I was glad to see some lesser known communities like VampireFreaks, which I have covered before, on the list. Jeremy defines engagement by average pages per visitor per month, and average visits per user per month. I think Jeremy did a good job on the post, and he definitely includes a lot of valuable information. But the question that becomes most apparent to me is, is this the best way to measure “engagement” for an online community or social network?

Some readers of Jeremy’s post have already pointed out two issues in the comments; one, the numbers don’t take into account poor design (i.e. myspace is much more inefficient then facebook, so therefore has more pageviews), and two, the numbers don’t take into account AJAX and other rich media formats. While these are two great points, there is a bigger mis-understanding: Page views are only a small part of measuring true engagement in a social network or community.

A user is engaged not when they are only viewing content, but are interacting with it. A user is far less valuable if they are not participating and contributing to the community. “Well Brian, aren’t users valuable from a revenue standpoint if they are creating page views?” Sort of. Do you think advertisers care about, or even value page views from people that flip through 100 photos in two minutes in someones Facebook photo album? No, and this is becoming more apparent, and will eventually run its due course.

A user is much more valuable to a community, to the publisher, and to the advertiser if they are interacting and contributing. 1,000 highly engaged page views is far more valuable than 10,000 non engaged page views to all the stakeholders involved. The best public measurement to date, time spent per page, still falls extremely short of measuring true engagement. In my opinion, the best way to measure engagement is to measure the contribution levels of comments posted, photos posted, blogs posted, (or whatever interaction points are in the community) compared to the number of active users.

Thanks to Chris for pointing me to the blog post.

Chart and Graphic via Lightspeed Ventures