Numbers, Shares, Likes: Is That All We’ve Become?
How many times have you posted a picture, a status update, or a video, and then sat there and waited with bated breath for the first person to like it or post a comment of approval, waiting for someone to come along and validate what you just put out?(!) Right, OK. So, I may be exaggerating a little, but don’t tell me you haven’t at least felt something like this, at least to a certain degree. Perhaps you have deleted something after it didn’t get any or enough likes; maybe it didn’t get enough recognition, at least, not as much as you wanted or expected. How much recognition on social media you expect, want, hope for; all the social media metrics can have a damaging effect on how we see and value ourselves. You can begin to start modelling such numbers as a reflection of your self-worth. For the most part, the “you” that you portray on social media is just a better version of yourself. It can be very difficult to match how you are in real life with how you are on social media or the Internet. Of course, it is usually the case that we all want to show ourselves as better through a screen; but that just seems natural because it’s simple to do while behind a computer.
People are measuring every concept of value based on numbers, essentially. How many “likes”, shares, followers, subscribers they have. It means something! “I have a lot of followers, it means I’m liked a lot. It means I’m popular. I’m worth something, I’m worth a lot! I must be worth a lot with so many of these numbers I have; the number of likes, views, and followers, I have.” If we do not have a large amount of these social media metrics, then are we not good enough? Do we not have any value? Some people seem to equate a large number of likes or followers as an actual metric for their own value as a person, and this extends into the value of anything else. This seems to hold true from a business perspective as well, or perhaps, especially. Heck, we even have jobs and professions related to the analysing and monitoring of social media metrics for most businesses. The use of social media metrics is an integral way of growing and maintaining a business, and at best to cultivate your online presence.
Now, social media metrics can be very comprehensive, from categorising “likes”, to even where they happened.
But when you get down to categorising the different kinds of numbers and even tracking where they came from, what does that really do? Do we begin to lose sight of the bigger picture by focusing too much on digging deep into social media analytics and seeing how we can better target more people to engage with a brand, or craft some content that is expected to be “a hit”?, which in turn, aims to acquire more engagement, and possibly increased sales. However, how much of this is actually effective? Have we gotten to a point where people have almost completely tuned out most of the ads (especially re-targeted ads), or where people just follow certain brand/company accounts just for the content they post online but not buy anything from them? Just as some of us may measure the value of ourselves with numbers, we are also the numbers that businesses use to measure their value.
