Social Media Engagement: Gleanster's 2011 Research and Best Practices

Gleanster Research published the Gleansight: Social Media Engagement report in September 2011, a 28-page study based on the experiences of 389 companies. An archived capture of the report's original landing page survives, letting this article restore its historical intent with unusual confidence for a resource this old — every statistic below is dated 2011 Gleanster research, not current social-media benchmarks.

Executive Summary

Gleanster's 2011 Social Media Engagement research examined how Top Performing organizations integrated social media into their overall marketing mix to power word-of-mouth programs, mobilize brand advocacy, stimulate consumer participation and purchase decisions, and enhance customer relationships. Based on 389 companies and published as a 28-page report, the research included a vendor landscape section covering 40 social media technology providers, evaluated on company descriptions, analyst commentary, and comparative rankings where available. A key reported finding compared Top Performers against "Everyone Else" (83%) on the importance of identifying and engaging brand advocates and influencers — though the specific Top Performer percentage survives only as an unreadable graphic in the archived capture used for this retrospective, not as extractable text.

Background and Source Verification

This retrospective is unusually well-grounded for a 2011 resource: an archived capture of the report's original landing page survives in the Wayback Machine, dated February 2012, preserving the report's title, publication date, page count, sample size, learning objectives, and full vendor list directly rather than through secondary paraphrase. Some details referenced in academic citations of this report — including the names Jeff Zabin, Steve Wilder, and David Carr, associated in some literature with this research — could not be independently confirmed from the surviving landing page itself, which does not display author bylines. This article treats those names as plausible but not independently re-verified from the primary capture used here.

From Broadcasting to Interaction

By 2011, social media platforms had moved well past their earliest use as one-way broadcast channels. Gleanster's research treated social media as a tool for fostering genuine engagement through interactive activities, positioning the technology's value around two-way participation rather than simply publishing content and counting followers. The report's framing centered on how social interaction could be converted into measurable business outcomes — acquisition, sales, advocacy, and traffic — rather than treating engagement as valuable in itself.

Why Companies Invested in Social Media Engagement

The archived landing page confirms three specific value drivers Gleanster associated with social media engagement: increasing customer acquisition, sales, and return on marketing investment; driving positive word of mouth and brand advocacy; and increasing the volume of in-store and website traffic, including fan-page traffic specifically. This last point — explicitly connecting social fan-page activity to in-store traffic — reflects how directly Gleanster's 2011 research tied social engagement to concrete commercial outcomes rather than softer brand-awareness metrics alone.

Brand Advocates and Influencers

Even without the precise Top Performer figure, the comparison structure itself is a confirmed, meaningful finding: Gleanster treated brand-advocate and influencer identification as a mainstream priority even among "Everyone Else" (83%), meaning the practice was already common industry-wide by 2011, and the research's Top Performer framing was measuring a difference in degree or in how effectively organizations executed on it, not whether they engaged with advocates at all.

Contests, Polls, and Referrals

Consistent with how social media engagement was commonly practiced in 2011, interactive activities such as contests, polls, and referral programs were standard mechanisms for converting passive social media presence into active participation. These tactics gave brands concrete, measurable actions to ask of their audience — entering a contest, answering a poll, referring a friend — rather than relying on organic engagement alone, directly supporting the report's stated objective of stimulating consumer participation and purchase decisions.

What Distinguished Top Performers

Gleanster's research consistently used a "Top Performer" designation to separate organizations reporting the strongest business outcomes from "Everyone Else," then examined what those organizations did differently. For the 2011 Social Media Engagement report, the confirmed comparison point centers on brand-advocate and influencer engagement, discussed above. The report's broader stated scope — measuring how organizations integrated social media into the marketing mix and measured success doing so — suggests the underlying Top Performer analysis extended beyond this single data point, but additional specific Top Performer statistics could not be recovered from the surviving landing page and are not invented here.

Historical Vendor Landscape

The archived landing page confirms the report's Vendor Landscape section included company descriptions, analyst commentary, and comparative rankings where available, covering the following technology solution providers: Adobe (Omniture), Affinitive, Alterian, Argyle Social, Awareness, Bazaarvoice, Buddy Media, BzzAgent, Context Optional, Converseon, Conversocial, Crowd Factory, Dachis Group, Empathica, EngageSciences, ExactTarget, Expion, HootSuite Media, Infosys Technologies, Involver, KIT Digital, MediaFunnel, Meltwater Group, Mzinga, ObjectiveMarketer, Offerpop, PowerReviews, Radian6, RightNow Technologies, Sendible, Shoutlet, Silverpop, SocialFlow, SocialTwist, SocialVolt, Spredfast, StrongMail, Syncapse, Vitrue, Wildfire Interactive, and Zuberance.

This vendor information describes 2011 market participants only. The social media technology landscape changed dramatically in the years that followed through acquisitions, platform shutdowns, and consolidation — a large share of the vendors listed above no longer exist as independent companies or standalone products. Nothing in this section should be read as a description of any vendor's current product, ranking, or market position.

Related Gleanster Social Research

Gleanster conducted separate research on related but distinct social media topics during this general period, including Social Media Marketing and Social Media Monitoring — the latter already covered on this site in its own dedicated article. The archived landing page for this Social Media Engagement report lists related resources including "Campaigns to Capabilities: Social Media & Marketing 2011" and "2012 and Social Media: What's Next?" as separate assets, confirming Gleanster treated engagement, marketing, and monitoring as related but distinct research lines rather than a single undifferentiated topic. This article is kept focused on social media engagement specifically and does not merge findings from those adjacent reports.

How Social Media Engagement Changed After 2011

Social media engagement practice changed substantially in the years following this 2011 research. Several platforms central to the 2011 vendor landscape were acquired, shut down, or repositioned entirely. Paid social advertising grew from a secondary tactic into a primary channel for many brands, algorithmic content distribution replaced the more chronological, follower-driven reach common in 2011, and short-form video became a dominant engagement format well after this period. Influencer marketing, mentioned here in nascent form through "brand advocates and influencers," grew into a distinct, professionalized marketing discipline with its own dedicated platforms and agencies. None of these later developments should be read back into the 2011 findings above.

What Social Media Engagement Means Today

Using current, separately sourced context rather than Gleanster's 2011 findings: modern social media engagement is typically measured through comments, shares, reactions, direct messages, community participation, customer-support interactions handled through social channels, social listening for brand sentiment, and engagement rate relative to reach or follower count. The core 2011 premise — that engagement should convert into acquisition, advocacy, and traffic rather than existing as a vanity metric — remains the standard framing for how social media performance is evaluated today, even as the specific platforms, formats, and vendors have changed completely.

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