Social media &
Fans and followers, more or better?
Filed under: Facebook, Ideas, Social Media, Twitter
I love big numbers and even more when they go up. Fast! There’s a huge pressure to just to get bigger numbers. It looks like success if you get 100 new followers every day. But if these followers are auto-follow spambots then there’s not much value in them. But even the perfectly human followers can be misleading if they are paying attention to you only to win a prize or take advantage in an one time offer.
So, how to measure the quality of the your fandom? I believe that the best metrics are engagement metrics. Count the instances when real action is taken:
- retweets
- @-conversations
- likes
- comments
If you have set up tools to measure these metrics then you can better understand the quality of your fans and followers. Set up composite metrics that give you insights about the value of your followership. Examples of composite metrics are:
- retweets per follower
- comments per Facebook fan
Or you can go even closer to the actual business value by measuring:
- site conversions by fans
- revenue from social channels
Big numbers are cool, but money in the bank is even better and this comes from real engaged people.
__________________
Image credit Don Solo
Posted on: March 28, 2011
I would rather have 2 good followers than 2,000 uninterested followers.
I had a Twitter account that I spent a lot of time building my follower base thinking it would benefit my efforts.
One day I sent out a tweet asking the real people following me to respond.
2 did. I kept them and just dropped the account.
I believe is about quality and not quantity, as Dave says a big number of fans is not the only thing we need.
I say that looking at our fans numbers is something for our EGO.
http://socialmedia4business.blogspot.com/2011/03/do-you-think-is-only-about-your-fans.html
It’s so easy to get caught up in the numbers and how many followers one gets. I absolutely agree with you on your perspective of quality over quantity.
Excellent post.
Excellent post!
I count myself lucky to have a couple of hundred followers at this point. It’s a slow enough add rate that I can manually check each new follower and report those ones that are obviously spam.