The Dangers of Chasing After Social Engagement Metrics
In a world drowning in data, we’re also swimming in noise. Are most social engagement metrics simply part of that?
I recently made a friend.
Because I like this friend, he (or is it a she?) will have to remain nameless. But for the sake of convenience, let’s call this person Nate, which isn’t his (or her) real name.
Nate is what you might call a rising star in the firmament of social media. His posts have quickly picked up traction. When I first encountered Nate online (we later met in real life) I immediately connected with what he was doing.
Like me, it seemed, Nate had an innate and sincere passion for creating and sharing “content” (this is the one time I actually use that term deliberately because it’s conveniently vague here). I connected with the crux of Nate’s mission. But it quickly became apparent to me that there was something slightly amiss.
With a speed that amazed me, Nate seemed to develop a serious case of a new internet syndrome called Dopamine Microhit Addiction Syndrome (DMAS).
DMAS isn’t a real condition, of course. But if it were it would be characterized by an addiction to the tiny releases of dopamine we feel whenever the sagacity of our thoughts are validated by the form of an online engagement that is really mostly meaningless in the context of our broader mission in life.
Examples of DMAS-inciting activities include:
- Accruing one new follower on Medium
- Receiving a certain numbers of likes for a post on Facebook
- Reaching an arbitrary number of followers on Twitter
Let me explain why I think that this is a potential condition that we all need to be cognizant of. And personally why I feel that it’s a trap that I want to work on avoiding falling into.
External Validation Is A Poor Measure Of Content Value
The danger of DMAS— as I witnessed with Nate — is that the syndrome quickly self-perpetuates. It can strike even the most guarded of us — derailing sincere content creators and turning them into virtual slaves beholden to the whims that tiny social engagement signals send.
The syndrome of chasing after what I often term vanity metrics also puts its sufferers into a tumultuous series of highs and lows.
The highs one receives after authoring something popular don’t last long. The troughs can pull them down for no reason at all. The innocent joy of authoring meaningful content gets replaced by a futile desire to placate audiences and accrue signals — likes, comments, subscribers — that in the bigger picture mean almost nothing.
The other danger of DMAS is that it predicates your self-image, as a content creator, upon something unpredictable and external — namely how your writing is received. Which is unfortunate because the worth of content and its immediate engagement levels are often wildly out of sync.
If the only way you’re measuring how well your content is being received is by simplistic engagement signals — like likes and comments — then you’re also missing out on an enormous part of the picture.
Those are the thoughts, feelings and sentiment that those who don’t engage with your content are keeping wrapped up in their thoughts which you don’t have access to. The more I learn about the power of hidden audiences the more I realize how much power and information lies locked up in them.
And what about engagement metrics anyway?
Even when we receive them what do they really mean?
Maybe most of your audience got up on the wrong side of bed when you wrote your last social post.
Perhaps the news cycle was too full and working against you when you sent out your last LinkedIn status.
There are many reasons — some way beyond your control — why a piece of content might fall flat on any given day. And if you’re constantly looking at the surface level signs of engagement, you risk missing out on the bigger picture. The one that talks about the kind of audience you’re developing.
Social Metrics Often Mean Nothing
But enough with the abstract reasoning.
Let me provide an example from my own content-creating career.
My most popular Medium post at the of time of writing this piece, with more than 2,000 claps, is my attempt to question how a course creator could have amassed such a staggering income.
An advertorial I wrote on behalf of an Irish tourism body, about Irish islands, has received more than 11,000 shares on social media.
But I would rank both pieces far down the list in terms of the most “worthy” pieces of authorship that I have penned over the course of my career, to date, as a writer. In fact, this piece means more to me than the piece that got shared more than 10,000 times on Facebook.
And so it was with sincere disappointment that I watched as Nate went from earnest content creator to vanity metric chaser.
Nate’s descent into the far reaches of vanity metric chasing was as fast as it was obvious.
He began setting himself arbitrary KPIs for engagement metrics that he wished to achieve. If he posted something that caught the right gust of the winds that blow over social media he would be elated. But if it didn’t he would agonize over what had gone wrong when arguably nothing had. His desire to create meaningful content was replaced by an obsession with algorithms and a quest to find ways to work them in his favor to shift some numbers in an upward direction. Nate stopped creating content for humans and began writing for algorithms.
It seemed to me as if Nate’s initial innocent enthusiasm for sharing content had been replaced by a nonsensical urge to gamify the process in order to collect metrics that ultimately meant nothing of substance.
Ignoring The Noise Helps Us Focus On The KPIs That Really Matter To Our Businesses
When doing a bit of background reading for this piece, I stumbled upon this piece by Gary Vaynerchuk. As Gary states: “All you need is one follower of the 10,000 to really change the course of your business or personal life.” That summarizes exactly what I’m trying to get at here.
When I was in school, I used to engage in swimming meets and competitions.
Ironically one of the only things that has stuck with me in the years since is this: You don’t waste even a fraction of a second checking where the swimmer in the lane next to you is. Because doing so can mean the difference between finishing in first and second place.
Nate’s experience was enlightening for me. But it also caused me to look in the mirror.
I check my Medium follower account periodically. Before I surpassed 500 connections on LinkedIn — to get the illustrious “500+ connections badge” that now virtually everybody has — I watched my connection count anxiously, waiting for the day when I would finally budge past 499. For me at last, I’ve since concluded that those are both complete wastes of my time.
I have a few key KPIs that I keep track of in my business and my note to self here is to keep looking at these instead of how many followers I have on Medium. One of those is how much income I make per month. The other is how many clients I’m currently working with. These are the things that really matter to me. They keep my business on track. And bread on my table.
Not only are they often meaningless, but vanity metrics like likes, followers and subscribers are like miniature darts of dopamine distracting us from focusing on our more important objectives as content creators and sharers.
In the interest of trying to gamify social networks, in a sense, they’ve turned us all against each other and against ourselves — in a furious and ultimately futile attempt to outdo one another.
Not only is it a battle that almost none of us stand a chance of winning — we’re competing against the world! — in many cases it’s also one that doesn’t matter. And who has a career to waste chasing after those?
Many of us are working to be more data-driven these days. But if we’re going to the trouble of collecting data, we also need to make sure that we’re measuring ourselves against the right benchmarks.
Most social networks put this kind of information in our faces — through notifications, emails, and other user touchpoints. It takes discipline and deliberate effort to resist the temptation to succumb to chase after them. As well as a good measure of contrarian thinking to question the received wisdom that these things matter at all.
Today, I’m resolving to stop logging into Medium to see whether I’ve picked up followers. And I’ll try to look the other way when the notification ticket puts that information in my face. Because ultimately, for my business, and my life, the number doesn’t really matter.
Metrics that don’t put money in the bank for me or make a critical difference to my business are ultimately mere distractions. In a world increasingly swimming with data, we’re also drowning in noise.
And like most distractions, I think they’re best ignored.
