“Engagement”
is probably the buzziest buzzword these days. From schools to retailers to
employers, all are admonished to engage their students, their customers, and
their workers, or suffer abandonment.
Online
engagement is often measured by the amount of two-way interaction—likes, posts,
retweets, comments, and such. However, Sephora, the beauty-products retail
chain, discovered that wasn’t such an effective indicator of true engagement.
According
to a Fast Company article, Sephora
analyzed user data for its online community site, which was launched in 2010. Visitors
to the site, called Beauty Talk, could set up profiles, share tips, and ask questions.
Before the analysis, the company assumed the users who actively participated
the most often were also their best customers.
The data
showed otherwise. Many posts were questions from new visitors seeking advice on
specific beauty problems. Once they got an answer, they didn’t necessarily
return to the site.
“Instead,
it turns out that superfans can be predicted based on their lurking,” noted the
article. “The more a user logs into a site day after day, week after week,
month after month, the more likely they are to become an active superfan.
Posting activity had relatively little to do with it.”
It seems superfans
enjoy viewing posts and other content on Sephora’s community, but they don’t
feel like chiming in. The upshot is that superfans shell out 10 times the
amount spent by the typical Sephora customer.
