Social media metrics should balance quality and quantity

Too many brands embark on social media campaigns with the idea that drumming up Twitter followers or Facebook fans is the single largest, perhaps even the only real, metric for success.

But measuring the success of a social media campaign purely with those metrics is as limited as gauging the success of your online ad campaign only by page impressions. The reason for this is that building up friends, fans and followers is relatively easy. There are businesses that will even sell them to you if that is what really matters to you.

Of course, those so-called fans and followers will not be the sort of quality customers and prospects that you’d ideally hope to engage with using social media. They’re there because they’re paid to be there and many of them are likely to be dummy accounts rather than real people. This sort of imaginary friend is of no use at all to your business.

It is harder, but significantly more worthwhile, to build up a base of social media contacts that are actually real people who fall within your target market and who actually have an interest in engaging with you. 

Ideally, you also want to get influential people engaging with your brand.

People with influence are not necessarily celebrities, but may simply be ordinary people trusted among their own (online and offline) community for their taste, opinions and insights.

It is far better to have 1,500 Twitter followers who shop regularly at one of your outlets or who might be interested in the widgets you sell than to have 15,000 followers who are mostly bots, duplicate accounts or simply people who have followed you in the hopes of being followed back.

High-quality followers benefit your brand in a number of ways. They are more likely to engage with you because they are actually interested in your business and the products and services it offers. The more enthusiastically users engage with you out of their own volition, the more of their friends and followers they will draw into your circle.

Of course, I am not arguing that you should not be trying to get as many social media followers as you possibly can. But there are no shortcuts to building up a large base of real and genuinely engaged customers and prospects. The only way to achieve that particular goal is by having a sound social media strategy based around good content and engagement.

Engagement is the real reason to be on social media. Healthy engagement means being responsive to clients on social media channels and interacting with them in an authentic and transparent manner so that they in turn engage with your brand. 

Many companies are a little afraid of engagement, believing that they could make mistakes that make them vulnerable to criticism or aggressive and unhappy customers with unreasonable demands. Instead, they decide that they will merely broadcast content using social media.

That approach is more like advertising, when social media almost needs to be thought of as a relationship management tool. Social media is not directly about brand-building or sales, but about relationships and reputation.  

Of course, measuring engagement is a thorny problem, which is one reason that many companies back away from it. You can use online reputation management tools, which will tell you whether people are talking about your brand, retweeting your content, and so on, but assigning values to those interactions is rather difficult.

Intuitively, it makes sense that quality matters. Is it better to have fewer followers that will be advocates for your brand, who will read your feeds and share them, and who will approach you with questions and feedback as opposed to millions who don’t care about a thing you post? Though it may be hard to assign a financial value to social media engagement, it is more valuable than simply having a high number on the followers or fans scoreboard.