Is Social Media All About the Numbers?
As he took down a mole poblano chicken drumstick over lunch, I posed the following question to Anu:
If Twitter let us hide the number of people who follow Naissance, would you want to do it?
The genesis of the question was a social media project for a client and the discussions we’ve had around measuring the success of such efforts. I thought about the Naissance Twitter account and LinkedIn profile, and that people encountering them probably:
- Focus immediately on the number of followers we have, and
- Make some sort of judgment based on that number
What if the 19 was 1,900?
At first I felt frustration. Yes, we have 19 followers, but we’re a new company and have never made an explicit ask/push to get people to pay attention to our social media presence. How dare anyone judge the Naissance book by its cover! This “reasoning” led to my question for Anu.
Then, of course, I realized that people DO judge books by their covers. At least in part. That’s the real world.
So since social media “ROI” is a fantasy for most firms, the easiest proxy for how well social media efforts are going is the number of friends/followers you have. And so the real world for social media means promotion is as important as content. Maybe more. Getting people over the initial hurdle of engaging you is the first and most important challenge.
As unappealing as it may sound, being shamelessly self-promoting is probably a good idea.