Social Media Metrics: Count Thank You’s, Not Click-Throughs

Many people who work with social media tools, especially managers who have employees working with social media tools, are obsessed with metrics. How will we know if it’s working? How do we measure growth? Measure influence?

One of the easiest things to do is count “followers,” “fans,” or some variation on the number of people who click one button and are now connected to you through social media somehow. Individuals, companies, and even government agencies compare these numbers, as if agency X having 23,000 followers and Y having 15,000 means that X is 50% better at social media.

Sure, popular people have more followers. News organizations have more followers. Whatever accounts deliver lots of value have more followers. But at some point, counting the number of followers actually counts for less and less. Anil Dash has probably written about this phenomenon best in his post, Nobody Has A Million Twitter Followers.

So what do you count?

I’m a fan of a line I use in some of my talks, which is, “Count thank you’s, not click throughs.” People typically either love it or hate it. But it’s true. I know I’m doing a great job not because I’m making bargraphs or drawing trendlines with analysis of bit.ly click throughs or Twitter followers, but because I get incoming emails that thank me, which ask me for advice, which consider me a subject-matter expert, which invite me to give talks, which invite me to private events.

People, companies, government agencies… without personal, authentic interaction in the Thank You Economy we find ourselves is, the number of followers doesn’t matter.

What does matter?

Seth Godin uses a bit of biology to talk about viral growth today. There’s some math behind it, so it can be measured (metrics!), but the bottom line is that a very small number of people with a high propensity to share easily trumps a very large number of people with a modest propensity to share.

In my view, the goal is to become remarkable. Literally remarkable, in the sense that people remark about your stuff. When you’re remarkable, not only do you know it, your boss knows it. And there’s hardly a need for metrics.

Viral spread is an indirect “thank you,” because every time someone voluntarily shares your stuff, they’re giving you props. When I get actual thank you’s in my email box, I know that’s just a small subset of people who actually would like to thank me. But people sharing virally are a healthy, more direct measure of people who are thanking you.

Albert Einstein said, “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.” But everyone knows something remarkable when they see it.

Posted via email from Mark’s Cheeky Posterous