Vanity metrics in social media marketing
Why I'm not a fan
Vanity metrics on social media are those that make you look great but won't help you understand your real social media success.
As a social media manager, I'm not a fan of vanity metrics. If you're a business who is only interested in increasing your followers by 1000 per month and using this as a measure of your success, you're not my ideal client.
Why am I so anti vanity metrics?
Because they don't come from real, actionable goals that you should set for your social media strategy.
Vanity metrics vs meaningful ones
As I mentioned earlier, if you're only interested in gaining mega followers on Instagram, I'm not your social media manager. You should never compare yourself to others. It's not a numbers game, but a quality game!
Meaningful metrics show you where there are real opportunities for growth such as content sharing, conversion rates, repeat page views, number of blog comments and site visitors.
For example, if you've shared a snippet to a blog, you can track how many people follow the link, how many comment on your blog, how many people come back to re-read it and so on.
You should set measurable goals to achieve before measuring vanity metrics
The meaningful metrics mentioned above are measurable goals. These are what you need to be looking at.
I encourage you first to determine your goals for social media. These could include things like:
Building your audience and creating a community that engages with each other
Increasing awareness of your business and becoming a thought leader
Driving sales and leads to your website and capturing their information
Generating new leads and nurturing existing ones
Increasing your presence online
Finding industry collaborations and forming partnerships with likeminded people
Improving your ROI for your marketing efforts
Tools such as Google Analytics come in handy for measuring these types of actionable goals.
The top social media metric I think you should monitor if nothing else
The most important thing you should look at with your social media efforts is engagement. It's social media – you need to be engaged to be social!
Engagement shows you how many people are interacting with your content across your social media platforms. These include things such as comments, shares, likes, clicks and saves. They are actionable aspects.
Social media engagement rates will show you what content your audience wants and in turn, helps you to create content that is targeted.
For example, you may have written a blog on a specialised service offering. If people have just liked your social post about your blog – that's a vanity metric and not worth much.
But if they've clicked on the social link to read the blog, shared it, saved it, made a comment or revisited it a couple of times, these are the engagement rates you need to be measuring. You know this is the sort of content your audience wants.
Then when you're creating your social media strategy, you can focus on creating more posts like these to increase your engagement rates (and ultimately become known as the expert who people buy from).
How do you feel about vanity metrics?
We're all different, and you may love vanity metrics! I'd love to hear your opinions. Do you measure vanity metrics? What have your tracked or found helpful? Please feel free to share and comment below.
If you'd like a hand with your social media, please get in touch.