INTRODUCING INVISIBLE ENGAGEMENT AND WHY IT MATTERS

Summary from the TLDR Marketing newsletter

Most consumer interaction with brand content happens through invisible actions that platforms do not track, which makes visible metrics misleading. In a study of 12,855 social media posts, only 0.6% showed visible engagement, while 22.3% showed invisible engagement and 77.1% showed none. The most common invisible actions were ‘see' at 42% and ‘stop' at 41%, which signal attention without public interaction. Posts linked to invisible actions such as ‘see', ‘search', or ‘save' had a higher median shop engagement rate of 10.1% compared to 6.8% for posts that received a ‘like'. These findings show that invisible engagement is more closely tied to purchase behavior and should play a larger role in how marketers measure performance.