How Well Do You Know Your Social Media Followers? Quality, Not Quantity!

10th June 2015

In terms of marketing, we tend to automatically value quantity over quality. After all, marketing is about promoting a business so that it’s visible to every target demographic, ultimately boosting sales and increasing profits - that’s what it all comes down to. However, is this really the right way to think about social media marketing, or is SMM a case where we should be placing greater importance on the quality of our followers, rather than the quantity?

‘Likes’ are Overrated

An interesting question we should be asking ourselves is whether a social media marketing campaign can be classified as successful or unsuccessful, based on the number of ‘likes’ it receives. Speaking from a logical standpoint, it would stand to reason that the more ‘likes’ a post receives, the more successful it has been - ultimately, it’s encouraged readers to take action. However, it’s not enough. Unless these readers share content with their friends or click through and convert, these ‘likes’ are largely pointless from a business perspective. Statistics show that 62 percent of social media users claim that social media does not influence purchasing decisions, suggesting that more than half of those ‘likes’ will come from users that have little or no intention of taking any further action.

Assessing Value

It’s important to remember that the number of followers your business has on social media has absolutely no association with any sort of measurable value, and that while you can’t necessarily connect quantity to revenue, you should be able to reasonably link sales to quality. Businesses should be specifically engaging with ‘influencers’ - those who are part of and regularly contribute to large, active online networks. Get to know who these influencers are, write engaging content aimed at this group specifically, and analyse the success of these posts.

Is social media marketing purely a numbers game? No, but that doesn’t mean that the numbers are completely useless. Greater follower counts can actually be persuasive in their own way, encouraging users to join what is already a community - most of us want to be ‘in the loop’ and a part of the crowd. Quantity isn’t something to be ignored but, it the case of SMM, quality continues to be a much more important factor for growing a successful business.

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