I recently spoke at a conference on social media in Europe, and after one of my presentations, I was politely reminded that simply giving pageview or impression statistics as a measure of the success of a social media campaign is kind of missing the point. I did not disagree. I had, in fact, mentioned a successful social media campaign and based this success (in my presentation, at least) purely on impressions and not on conversions or audience engagement. Generally, one follows the other to some extent, but we do need to be careful that we place the right amount of emphasis on things like engagement, interaction and brand advocacy as opposed to the mythical ‘viral’ phenomenon that many campaigns, which fail to deliver tangible conversions experience.
So this brings me to the point: is social media not a numbers game at all? Meaning, should our targets never be simply to increase our Facebook fans or achieve a certain amount of views of a video, or gain a greater following on Twitter? Even those that make this argument use audience engagement statistics (which are themselves numbers) to validate the success of a brand or campaign.
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Posted on November 29, 2011
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