Brands and Platforms Refocus on Fans and Followers

Twitter cofounder Ev Williams spoke out this week saying that Twitter followers really aren’t the most important metric for users. Instead he said, “The thing I think would be more interesting than followers is retweets,” because it will do a better job to get an idea of how your content was distributed.

Ultimately, it’s about how many people saw your content, according to Williams, which is part of the reason Twitter has been restricting its API to third-parties. If Twitter controls the interface, it can deliver better data than we can get elsewhere.

Are Platforms Moving Away from Cosmetics?

Source: stock.xchngFans, followers, subscribers, etc. really don’t mean a heck of a lot. It’s gotten so bad that fake followers and likes have been bought, which Facebook took steps to combat this week when it removed a vast amount of fake accounts.

A follower or a fan is cosmetic if the brand is unable to entice the person on the other end to take action. Plus, there’s the challenge that a brand really doesn’t own its followers or fans. They’re merely rented for as long as the brand uses a particular social network or until the social network decides to change the rules.

It’s clear that both Facebook and Twitter know that the obsession with followers and likes is coming to an end, which points to a need to evolve. However, for Facebook in particular, this obsession has led to a lot of revenue as advertisers use Facebook ads to build their fan bases. Still, platforms are looking at other ways to show value beyond amassing as many people as possible.

Platforms refocusing may force marketers to refocus as well.

Are Marketers Ready?

Fans and followers make life simple for us. The idea of “the more, the better” appeals to marketers’ need to see scale and reach as many people as possible.

The question is do we want what’s easy or what is right? The right approach is getting as many of the right people as possible, not just anyone. Those are the people you can distribute your brand message to in a way that aligns with their passions and their personal interests.

The benefit of going after the right people is a brand’s message doesn’t fall on deaf ears, which means the brand looks more successful because it sees a higher level of engagement.

Are we entering an age of really putting quality over quantity? I hope so.

Weeding Out Fake Followers

Source: stock.xchngIn an effort to maintain its position as a “genuine advertising platform” and give brands a more accurate measure of their Facebook fans, Facebook has announced that it is working to remove fraudulent Likes from spammers, malware and fake accounts. All of this follows a recent and disturbing trend of people and brands purchasing fake Likes and Twitter followers.

According to Facebook, this will likely result in about a 1% decrease in Page Likes. That’s right. Brands will likely experience a decline in the number of people who ‘Like’ their Pages. I know. This is unacceptable! …I’m kidding, of course.

This Shouldn’t Matter

It shouldn’t have to be said, but this doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s a very good thing. Whether brands encouraged it or not, there’s a very good chance that across all of their marketing channels, they have ‘dead’ leads—email addresses that are no longer active, Twitter followers who are spammers, blog subscribers who no longer pay attention and so on.

Facebook’s doing us a favor. As marketers, we should constantly work to ‘weed out’ the dead leads. This includes removing fake followers on every channel. They give a brand a false sense of where it stands and who its reaching. In fact, some bloggers actually move their blog RSS feeds by announcing it on their blogs. The people who move to the new feed are the real followers. The people who don’t weren’t paying attention anyways.

Look Beyond Vanity Metrics

All of this goes to show that metrics like ‘likes’ and followers are merely vanity metrics. They’re nice to put on a slide and to bring up at a conference, but they lack substance. In fact, as Facebook has shown, they may not truly be accurate.

The true value lies in a brand’s ability to measure the activity those numbers represent. What buyer behavior do fans and followers exhibit that others do not? Do they share more brand content? Are they more likely to buy?

Facebook Pages Should Be Communities

Facebook’s actions should help to refocus some brands out there that have gotten distracted by vanity metrics. Facebook allows brands to tap into the largest group of users ever on one platform to hopefully gain their attention, earn a ‘like’ and turn them into something more—a community of people invested in the brand and helping it succeed by sharing their personal thoughts and opinions with the brand and social connections (what a sentence!).

A marketer looking to grow a community doesn’t want vanity metrics. It wants the brand’s closest advocates to build the foundation of a community that can maximize Facebook’s potential.