Vanity Metrics

The Reason Why Your Social Media Strategy Is Failing

Vanity Metrics are aspects of a business that can easily be edited or manipulated but do not necessarily matter. This includes things like social media followers, likes, subscribers and views. This is because they are not directly correlated with the numbers that determine how successful a business is, but more for feeling good about achieving those results. They also do not contribute anything helpful for future digital marketing decisions. A big example of this is measuring the number of visitors you have on your website, as this information is very vague and doesn’t reflect much on your business. This is because you can never really know from a graph what people’s intentions are, or the real reasons behind the “peaks” of visitors. For example, it could have been because of something you did, or maybe something that someone else did. Along with this, you do not make money off the number of people that visit your website, the likes or followers, so there is really no point in measuring this. You also don’t know the reasoning behind their likes, or whether they actually care or not. So you might as well not waste your time by measuring things like this, that does not make a difference to your business.

Why Your ‘Likes’ Don’t Mean Much

why your likes don't mean much

  Social media likes are a big example of a vanity metric since they do not benefit your business much based on the reasons above. Likes don’t do anything for your business, other than make you feel good about it. Just because someone “likes” your page does not mean they are genuinely interested in what you have to offer, and it does not do anything beneficial for the marketing aspect of your business. They end up creating an illusion of how successful your business really is, and a distraction from other important factors that determine how well it is really doing. SO rather than getting caught up in vanity metrics, one should focus on coming up with a framework that can be more efficient in measuring your market campaigns, and really dig deeper into your numbers.

Facebook

facebook

  Rather than using facebook likes to measure, using a tool called “Facebook Insights,” which is a free analytical tool that Facebook provides. This could be better for determining the amount of engagement that your page has, such as the shares of posts and the comments on it. It is the engagement that says something, rather than a simple like.

Twitter

twitter

  On Twitter, you should stop focusing on the number of followers you have, but rather use some tools to determine how engaged your followers are. To figure out what your followers talk about, one should use a tool called “Cadmus” to determine what their most shared links are.

Although vanity metrics should not be disregarded entirely, one should be cautious about how much they look into them. They can have a tendency to trick you into what to believe, and not efficient enough for your future marketing strategies.

Contact Us to learn more about vanity metrics and how to avoid common social media mistakes

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