Social Media Engagement: How to Make Your Brand the Life of The Digital Party

By rsukhraj@hubspot.com (Ramona Sukhraj)

Download Now: The 2025 State of Social Media Trends [Free Report]

Engagement on social media is like mingling at a party.

There could be tons of people in the room (read: following you), the music could be great, and the vibe could be just right, but if no one’s conversing, the party’s dead — and no one wants to throw a lousy party.

By prioritizing social media engagement, businesses can avoid this fate and accomplish their marketing goals. Likes and comments may seem like vanity metrics, but they are catalysts for the greater traffic, conversions, and sales brands need to grow.

Pulling from the latest data from our 2025 Social Media Trends report, let’s unpack everything you need to know about social media engagement and how to harness it for your business.

Table of Contents

What is social media engagement?
Why is social media engagement important?
How to Increase Social Media Engagement

What is social media engagement?

Social media engagement is when social media shifts from passive to active, from laying around on the couch to up and running around the neighborhood. It’s any interaction a user has with an account, creator, or piece of content on a social media platform, including likes, comments, direct messages, shares, clicks, and tags.

Why is social media engagement important?

These days, anyone can post on social media or get a high follower count. Heck, posting can be automated, and followers can be bought. Neither of these are worth bragging about, but high engagement? That’s something you can be proud of.

In a marketing context, engagement is the first step toward actually accomplishing your goals with social media. Want to drive website traffic? You need to get someone to click. Want to build awareness? That’s where sharing comes in.

It all starts with engaging, but there are also several other benefits.

Influences Algorithm

Achieving organic social media marketing success isn’t impossible, but it is much harder than a decade ago. Regardless of platform, what your audience sees is determined by an algorithm.

Our survey found keeping up with features and algorithm updates is one of the top 5 challenges marketers face with social media, but industry experts agree engagement is one of the most consistent criteria.

Check out Meta’s content ranking criteria, for instance.

Social media algorithms see engagement as a vote of confidence. The more people engage, the better the content and the more it should be shared.

Increases Brand Awareness and Discoverability

The better you do with social media algorithms, the more likely your content will appear in explore/discovery feeds and be seen by new people. New people mean new potential audience members and, more importantly, customers.

Marketers named building brand awareness their top goal with social media in 2025, so this can’t be ignored.