If you’re a regular social media user, you’ll know that it feels good to have our opinions, photos and life updates validated by other people. Maybe you’ve tweeted a joke and seen the retweet count rocket up, or looked on in envy as one of your Facebook friends rakes in the likes for their latest profile picture.
In fact, getting a ‘like’ on social media has been proven to increase dopamine levels in the brain – dopamine being the ‘feel-good’ hormone.
While they’re satisfying, your business shouldn’t be obsessing over them. It looks good, having a business with more social media followers than your competitors, but they’re not that important in the grand scheme of things.
Vanity Metrics
Social media followers and likes are what are known as ‘vanity metrics’. They look great on paper but are of little value to your future business goals. If your competitor is out-selling you, who cares how many people liked your latest Insta post?
This isn’t to say social media isn’t an important tool in the modern business world – it is – but when we obsess over our follower counts we miss the more important things. The point of your social media should be to help your business make money. So what we need to look at are things like the traffic social media brings to your website and the people who convert through social media.
Quality, not Quantity
While having more followers may generally correlate to more people clicking on your posts, more important than the quantity of followers is the quality of followers. By that, I mean, is your audience an engaged one? Are people enjoying your content? Do you get regular interactions? We need to focus on why people follow our pages, not how many of them. Anybody can buy followers, but the best and most successful social media pages earn them.
I’ve helped my clients be successful on social media not by obsessing over the overall number of followers, but by basing their social media strategy around what genuinely creates value for their business. One person buying your product through social media is worth more than 1,000 empty likes who don’t care what you post about.
~Business Game Changer Special Promotion~
If you still want to grow your overall number of followers (let’s face it, they’re called vanity metrics because they make us feel good) then producing quality content will bring people to your pages anyway – to quote Field of Dreams “if you build it, they will come.”
