Mirror, Mirror on the wall, how many followers do I have on Twitter? What’s the size of my MailChimp mailing list? How many likes are on my Facebook page?
Do you regularly ask these questions? If you do, then it’s time that somebody introduced you to the concept of Vanity Metrics.
What are Vanity Metrics?
Vanity Metrics are statistics that can be easily measured and manipulated but which really have no particular value. A good way of understanding these statistics is if you think of your Facebook friends list; how many of them would you actually call if you had a real problem or if you just fancied a coffee? I would hazard that there are only about 10-20 people on there that you would call genuine friends. The same can be said for the metrics on your business pages and mailing lists, except swap the word ‘friend’ for ‘customer’.
Here are just a few of the most commonly used Vanity Metrics and alternative stats that may help you gain a better viewpoint of your business’s digital footprint.
Facebook Fans
Facebook page likes, and followers do not mean that people are reading your posts. I regularly get requests to like pages that I have no intention of actually buying anything from. I usually like them to be polite and to show the person inviting me that I support their business venture.
Just because a page has loads of likes doesn’t necessarily mean that they are gaining lots of business from them. In fact, because more and more companies on Facebook produce more and more content and request more likes, a message can become diluted. Over recent years post visibility has reduced as the marketplace has become more crowded.
Let’s talk about Engagement instead. Post Engagement is a much more concrete statistic to focus on, and it can’t be manipulated as easily. Think about it, by seeing which users have shared or liked your post, you actually have something tangible to work with. You can begin focussing on where visitors to your website come from and can also confirm whether marketing and advertising campaigns have worked.
Twitter/Instagram Followers
In much the same vein as Facebook, the number of Twitter/Instagram followers you have is really irrelevant unless you are a Kardashian.
So, you are a local furniture removal company, is a Russian cosplay model who follows you going to use your business? Probably not. People on Twitter can be sneaky. They pop up, follow you, expect you to be polite and follow them back and then dump you a few weeks later.
I’d suggest instead that you look at your local competitors. What are their follower bases like? If your most successful competitor has 2000 followers, then realistically, that is probably the number that you should be aiming for. Every account has a finite number of people who are going to be interested in it.
While I’m on the subject of Twitter, it’s also useful to check the analytics to look at your Engagement and to check which accounts are engaging with you. Beware the accounts that appear on your feed, promising you thousands of followers if you follow them back; trust me, they won’t. Never buy followers. We have a policy of not working with businesses that have bought followers.
Email Opens
My mailbox automatically opens my emails just to check that there aren’t any dodgy viruses there, and then I usually delete the ones from mailing lists (unless I spot something in the first line that interests me). Somewhere in another part of the country, a person takes the news that my email has been opened and uses it as a Vanity Measure.
A more realistic statistic is to consider the number of click-throughs from the email and also how many people read it to the end. After all, the point of sending out emails to a mailing list is to get more business and attract customers to your website, right? The only thing that you can learn from email open rates is that if no one clicks through, you’ve probably got the message very, very wrong!
Blog Post Views
Hopefully, you’re starting to see a pattern here. Blog post views, how many times have you clicked through to a page, read the first line and then closed the page without reading any further? On a blog post that counts as a view.
A much better metric is the bounce rate on your post. If people move away from the page without clicking anywhere else that counts as a bounce. Again, the whole point of your blog is to show your potential customers what you are good at, so a bounce straight off the page is perhaps not what you want to achieve. If you’re achieving a high number of bounces, have a look at all of your metrics (that includes all of the ones I’ve listed above) and see how the rest of your platforms are performing. Time spent on each page, did they stay on the blog page long enough to read it all? That is a useful metric to know.
What is the most important metric of all?
In conclusion, we all like to see that we are succeeding, but we should also be aware of when the metrics that we are using are skewed. Just like using a 10-year-old photograph on a dating site or opting for a comb-over, focusing on Vanity Metrics will always catch you out in the end.
So what is the most important metric of all? Your bottom line figures: enquiry numbers, conversions of enquiry to sales, sales uplift to your existing customer base, turnover and, of course, PROFIT! I have known people with huge social media feeds who do not make any money and have to prop their businesses up via other income sources. Social media is one part of your marketing strategy designed to help you achieve your business plan. If the fundamental core of your business plan does not support you making a profit, then vanity metrics are the least of your concerns.
Have a chat with us
If you’d like to see how many of your followers are real and how many are vanity metrics, we’re happy to sit down with you and look through your stats. Drop us an email to start a conversation.