How would you like 10,000 likes on Facebook? Or 20,000 followers on Twitter? It’s not so far out of reach. You can easily buy these services from shady companies out there living off of the hype and emotion of people and companies eager to get their vanity metrics up.
They are called vanity metrics because these make you feel good, but do not have much to do with real goals such as revenue increase.
In fact, trying to use gimmicks to get attention and drive up these vanity metrics using hype can be damaging. For example, if you hire a Twitter service that is using scripts to drive follower count, they may follow and unfollow as part of a query function. It’s impersonal, but it can get people to look when they are tapped by this script.
A person who is turned off or tuned out can look at your brand in a negative light and your actions only created mistrust. You would not know of course because they are just part of the masses. But multiply the effect and your name can be damaged in the minds of many people. They won’t think you are professional, much less trustworthy.
The Real Metrics
Aside from the hype of artificially inflating your vanity metrics, you can look under the hood. If you have 10,000 Facebook likes and only 30 people that regularly engage and much less taking any kind of action, it is a precipitous drop in conversions. Also, what about the 9,970 other people whose attention you are wasting and may be annoying?
Some companies have not identified their target audience correctly on Facebook and should even consider getting rid of their Facebook presence. It’s not worth the effort and it creates a lot of effort without any return.
The real metrics are not about the hype from big follower numbers. It has to do with how many people are tuning in and taking real action.
If you are selling a product for $50, it will take a dramatic amount of sales transactions to justify the ads and effort to drive follower count on Facebook.
On the other hand, if you sell something for $5,000, then a smaller follower count with much higher quality of likes and followers will require only a few sales to justify the investment in time and money.
Ultimately, your social media is a distribution channel. Your content should reside on your own platform and be your own asset.
Announcing what is happening and pulling people in to be real fans rather than cursory bystanders will create a true tribe of people that will take action and refer others.
The masses who are only part of making you feel good create noise. They are hype. They distract and you can create a bad name in the marketplace. You can simply be annoying people because of an aimless strategy.
Stay focused and build your audience authentically. It will have a return over time and you won’t have to backtrack cleaning up or addressing negative PR.