Real or Fake social media numbers?
I read this article on Facebook and I believe it poses an important question: How real are the social media usage numbers? It is obvious that they are constantly increasing but there have been studies showing "empty" profiles and abandoned accounts. For marketers purposes this is a very relevant question that needs to be addressed by social media companies, which must be pressured to release "real" account numbers for the industry's sake.
I appreciate marketers concerns with the real or fake social media number debate. I do however urge marketers to look beyond numbers and focus their social media efforts on quality not quantity and identifying key influencers. This is where services such as Klout are growing in popularity as we grow to understand and embrace the importance of understanding and leveraging those individuals and groups that have genuine influence in our target markets.
ReplyDeleteI'd put it this way. It's not how many followers, likes, fans, whatever. It is their value to the brand--do they share, do they buy, do they refer new customers? They have no value just sitting there. It's another of those areas in which I can get you fans, followers, sales leads, whatever--just give me a big budget so I can give away stuff. So I don't care a great deal whether the top-line numbers are real or fake (although I'd rather get rid of all the noise); I care about what happens on the consumer decision journey.
ReplyDeleteContinuing in the same vein, I'd like to pose a question- F Commerce, Myth or Reality? The fact that a site/blog/Facebook profile has many likes or retweets is not all that important- the real impact is what additional revenue does that internet presence bring to the company. Is social media and your Facebook presence resulting in monetisation of i-presence ? There seems to be more noise than susbstance in this key area. This is similar to the internet boom of 2006-2008 where "eyeballs" was a key criteria to gain sky rocketing valuations for any company that had a .com after its name. What was ignored is a sound business model that could generate revenue as a result of capturing eyeballs. This lead to the .com bust as soon astute investors realized that a lot of visitors and fans mean significantly less, if that does not result in an inflow of additional revenue.
ReplyDeleteAs a result, some big brand company's are closing their Facebook store fronts because of the lack of sales they realized. For F- Commerce in particular and S-Commerce(social commerce) in general to pick up, marketers must move up the value chain- go beyond capturing a large number of eyeballs/likes to monetising that fan following- at the end of the day, if all that frenetic activity is not bringing in measurable direct revenue, then it can be a hard sell to the CFO's office to continue to shell out big dollars to maintain that internet presence. An interesting article, "Will F- Commerce Really Fly" makes this argument as well-http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/daily-brief/2012/02/17/some-retailers-shutter-facebook-shops-but-others-remain-hopeful
My view on that is to let it go that way.
ReplyDeleteThe figures should be interpreted as a trend or a rough estimate.