Social Media: Stop It With Pointless Metrics

Online marketing is of course a new phenomena, when compared with most other forms of marketing, and with it being in its infancy we’ve all got to be prepared to adapt to new ways of thinking on a regular basis.

That’s not a bad thing, it just means that as marketing platforms mature, you need to stay on top of results tracking to ensure you’re not reporting on metrics that are outdated or mis-representative of results.

Social Media Marketers: I’m looking at you!

We’ve all been there, sat in a meeting with your boss, or client, and they’ve said something like:  “Our competitors have got 40,000 Facebook likes and 20,000 followers on twitter more than we do, we need to double down on our Social Media!”.

Let’s be perfectly clear, tracking social media based on likes, or follower numbers, is a pointless metric. For a start, both can be easily gamed, but increasingly platform are moving towards more sophisticated content targeting which for many companies means their chances of getting an ROI out of social media is significantly reduced.

Facebook’s News Feed Rank & Twitter’s ‘While You Were Away’

Facebook has spent years developing their algorithm to float relevant content to the top of people’s news feeds, originally called EdgeRank (although renamed back in 2013 when it was re-released) its fundamentals are pretty clear:  the likelihood of any individual seeing your content depends on a few factors, whether they are perceived to find it interesting, how fresh it is, whether your friends with similar interest profiles see it, and whether you’ve previously liked the originating source.

Twitter has for a long time been much simpler, purely sorting its tweets by time decay and showing you the whole list from every account you follow.  Things are highly likely to change pretty soon though, the first clues came when the twitter search functionality moved to “popular tweets” first, and with current features like “while you were away” going further to push users feeds away from a straight list and towards a more algorithmically curated list.

So why are Likes or Followers irrelevant then?

Someone liking or following you is essentially just an “opt-in” these days, they agree to maybe see your messages in the future. Whether they actually see them depends increasingly on whether they are likely to find the content interesting.

What Should I do & What Should I Report on?

Social media should never be considered a “broadcast medium” ,  its no longer suitable as a one to many distribution – it should be considered a discussion medium, where you can engage your audiences with your message, your brand and your personality.

Moving away from messaging and towards discussion and interaction reveals the true metrics you should be concerned with: Engagement rates!

Measuring Social Media Effectively

Thankfully, both Twitter and Facebook provide lots of metrics, and have robust, free, analytics platforms.

Twitter recently revamped their entire analytics platform and its accessible to everyone with an account just by going to http://analytics.twitter.com and it provides in depth statistics on a per tweet basis. 

You can (and should) export all the data into excel and build a dashboard charting interaction rates over time, and analyzing your top historical tweets to look for patterns and content that your users find valuable.

Facebook provide great insights for pages as well, including details on your audience demographics, active times of day, your total reach, and specific details on each post you made including click through’s and much more.

Equally you should be using this data in the same way as twitter’s to identify which content resonates best with your audiences, and using that information to tailor all your future communications.

Lets make 2015 the year we abandon false metrics!