A recent study revealed that social media marketers are still hung up on size; still worried about quantity over quality when it comes to social media marketing measurement.
As anyone who knows me or has been around me for more than thirty seconds knows I am a somewhat of a pop culture savant. I love to combine my knowledge of inane, otherwise useless information with my knowledge of social media and marketing and advertising.
Exhibit A can be found in an article I wrote last year for Marketing Profs titled:
"Baby, We Were Born to Market: Springsteen on Social Media Marketing," in which I used lyrics from Springsteen songs and applied them to social media marketing.
Today I want to quote another fine American, Foghorn Leghorn.
Yes, that Foghorn Leghorn for after reading the results of a survey conducted by Awareness called the "State Of Social Media Marketing" the first thing that came to mind upon seeing one finding in particular was Mr. Leghorn's classic lament...
"No, no, no! You're doin' it all wrong!"
This is the finding in question:
It was quite disheartening to say the least to see over 75% of the respondents still worried about size.
This is not the porn industry here, kids and this is not about buying a house... SIZE DOESN'T MATTER!
Sure, it would look great and would surely pump up your social media marketing ego to be able to tout that your client has 50,000 followers on Twitter and their Facebook page has 120,000 Likes. But instead of rolling out useless numbers as you wait your cup of coffee to finish brewing in the company break room, why not roll out how many leads and sales you're efforts have led to.
And absolutely why not puff your chest out and tell the world how much traffic to the client's website your efforts have resulted in. At least 67% of the responders identified that as being an important metric to measure and brag about, presumably.
But likes and followers? As my 7-year old son would say, 'really?'
We're not talking about the early days of social media where it was ALL about the size; it was ALL about who had the most followers, fans, likes and on and on and on.
Nowadays with the practice of buying followers and likes so prevalent how can anyone put any stock in numbers?
To me my goal would be to drive as many people to a website as possible who in turn become viable leads and hopefully, sales.
Of course there is one caveat to all of this. One minor little detail every social media marketing and company, brand and business should know.
And that is if your product, your service, your ware sucks... social media won't do a damn thing to help your bottom line.
I call it "Social Media's Dirty Little Secret" and I wrote all about it and I invite you to learn more about it by reading the article by clicking here.
Ok, so let me know what you think...
What are you, as a social media marketer, focused on when it comes to metrics?
How are you helping your clients or even your own company via social media?
And hey, if you're one of those unfortunate souls who has to social media market an inferior product, service or ware, I want to hear from you, too. You don't have to leave your name, I will understand.
Sources: Awareness Networks, Vitrue, Google Images
Steve Olenski is a freelance writer/blogger currently looking for full-time work. He has over 20 years experience in advertising and marketing. He lives in Philly and can be reached via email, Twitter ,LinkedIn or his website.