The Real Numbers That Matter in Social Media

Once upon a time, the social media world was a simple and easy world. There were Facebook and Twitter. People started collecting Facebook likes, some of them really tried to buy some real likes and some of them tried to make a business from that. And on Twitter there was a real community where people talked more than curating content and sharing links with the purpose to become an influencer.

And the specialist thought about the situation when numbers were an interesting thing to go at meetings and tell the executives and CEOs that social media is big, and if they want to be somebody in this area, they need to start running after these numbers.

So the marketing department started the marathon after the numbers.

“Let’s have more likes than our competition” or “Let’s do something to grow our followers on Twitter” and stuff like this. But then, guess what: 2015 and 2016 knocked at their doors and told them that these numbers are irrelevant.

So the big social media platforms started to cut down the likes and reach if you don’t have real engagement from the real people.

Exactly. The numbers about followers and likes are so irrelevant in 2016 and will still be in 2017 that nobody will care that your Twitter profile has 3.5 m followers and zero engagement.

The pointless influencer

More than that, I had a chance to work with an influencer on Twitter that has more than 1 million followers and I thought that only if I can make him tweet a specific link. And guess what? He tweet that link to his tremendous number of followers. My eyes got stuck on the analytics real time overview, and I waited and waited and waited to see the magic…and I switched the browsers…then I changed my laptop…then I went to a colleague to see what is wrong with that count.

Nothing. Nada. Nimic. Zero. That tweet from that big influencer with so many followers was irrelevant.

And then I went to his profile page and started a research on his “personal brand on social media” and I saw nothing. I saw 1 or 2 RT’s or 2 likes on a tweet. Why? Because what he is doing doesn’t have an impact on his community. Even if he is a writer, a “big influencer” in his community and people love him. But the real numbers on his Twitter profile tell me that he is doing something wrong.

Maybe he spammed a lot and the content he is sharing isn’t anymore a valuable one for his community. Maybe he should invest more time and energy on other social networks than on Twitter.

I admit, I was in the same position (but without the millions of followers): I didn’t have any engagement on my Facebook profile. Even if I shared valuable information (I thought so). Even if I started with Instagram pictures or other visual content to hook up people. Nothing.

Then Oana told me that I need to create more personal content in order to have more engagement. So I started thinking more on my Facebook statuses and tried to be consistent with what I’m saying and doing. And after I week of experiment, I saw how the engagement numbers went up.

The real numbers – engagement!

What I really want to say is that nobody cares today about numbers such as likes on Facebook pages or followers on Twitter and Instagram.

I believe that the only thing that matters in social media is engagement.

How do you engage with your community? How you can make them talk with you and react to your content, more than some simple likes.

I’m still waiting to these numbers in social media campaigns where the marketer will boost is the engagement and comments, and he won’t say a word about likes or followers.