Your Social Media Team is Lying to You

Whether you’ve hired freelancers or have someone in-house handling your social media marketing, chances are they’re lying to you. They’re showing you positive metrics that do not matter. Maybe they’ve claimed your company’s content has a lot of “impressions” or “views” or even an increase in followers. These ersatz metrics will eventually cost you dearly in wasted time and money. I oversaw social media in-house for massive Fortune 500 corporations; I’ve seen how data is massaged and crafted to support the marketing team’s objectives (usually to get next year’s budget approved) instead of the company’s objectives. In this article, I’ll show you the proper metrics that need to be tracked. You may want to print this out.

Impressions: Paying by the Second

The biggest lie in the industry are impressions. In its most basic definition, an impression is how often your ad is displayed. (Google Inc. 2018) The precise definition and how impressions are calculated is different on every social network. Comparing impressions Facebook Ads to Twitter Ads isn’t apples to apples. The time requirement for an impression to count is one second. (MRC 2016) Your content is being shown alongside other pieces of content vying for the same customer’s attention. And each social media company is happily billing you for that second. They’re even now measuring sub-second impressions, less than a second. (LaRue 2017) If someone starts off their social media metrics presentation with impressions it means nothing else performed well.

Video Views: 3 Seconds of Fame

Video content has been a dominant player in social media world over the past few years and only gaining in popularity. YouTube was the first to really showcase the importance of views. If something got “a million views” it’s deemed a success. Every business and content creator are pushing through the social feed with sharp elbows trying to go “viral.” This is why the view count is placed alongside videos so prominently. This is wrong. It’s a clever gimmick created by the platform.

Now, you may be realistic and understand your video on the bond markets isn’t going to beat the endless cat videos out there, nevertheless, you still want to know how it performed. That’s fair. However, view counts are just as finicky as impressions.

On all social media platforms with the exception of YouTube, a view can be as little as 3 seconds. These definitions are constantly shifting but as it stands this is what counts as a video view:

• Twitter: 3 seconds
• Facebook: 3 seconds
• YouTube: 30 seconds

Pretty absurd when you consider most of these videos auto-play in a user’s feed. You’re getting billed for a video that the user didn’t necessarily choose to engage with. Buffer did a remarkable in-depth breakdown about video views in the cited report. (Buffer 2017)

Reach: How Many People Saw My Ad?

Reach is a measuring the number of people who saw your content. It’s best to think of it as a unique impression. Your content can be seen multiple times by the same person; thus making impressions always equal or greater than the reach. (Gottke 2018) It’s important to remember that the targeted customer may be getting annoyed by the persistent retargeting, ala ad-fatigue. This means a high reach number shouldn’t be viewed as a blanket success metric. You probably notice TurboTax hitting you incessantly with the same ad during tax season. Reach can be good for determining how often to show a campaign of advertisements, more on that in another post.

What You Should Measure in Social

Unfortunately, there isn’t a single metric I can point to with bold confidence and say only track this. It depends on your company’s marketing objectives. Some people want more followers, more views, just to build the façade of social clout. Others are looking for their users to share their content which is great. There are however, metrics that are clean-cut and simpler to measure the real success of.

1. Link Clicks — If your social content was advertising a new sneaker and the user clicked on the ad then that’s a success. Getting a user to leave the social platform’s experience to enter your website is one of the most valuable actions they can take. Whether they purchased or not will be reflected in your web analytics. Either way, if you have tracking setup correctly, that user should now be pixeled and your content should be getting served to that person more frequently. This is how retargeting works.
2. Email Signups — I’ve built my business around social media. Yet when clients ask me what’s the most important number to focus on, be it followers, view counts, etc., I always tell them one thing: emails. If you can have a prospect trust you with their email address you’ve achieved a level many businesses fail to get to. I say this because you have total control over your email list. Social networks are constantly changing how their content is displayed. These social networks essentially holding your followers hostage and demand payment for your content to be seen by all of them. Organic Facebook content is only seen by 2% of your followers. (DMR 2018) An email list is free to talk to.
3. Comments — Ignore the trolls like you would a lunatic shouting in a subway car. The real comments, from your true followers, are critical. That’s your community waiting to be tended to. That is the value of social media. Two decades ago you couldn’t talk to brands as big as Budweiser or BMW. But today you can. Have a problem with an Airline? Tweet at them. Want to get more info on your favorite band’s touring schedule? Comment on their Facebook page. Regardless of the company or personal brand you may run, the comments in your feed are vital to its success. (Note: I’ve worked with brands that are highly regulated, where you cannot necessarily reply publicly to the comments. There are legally approved methods for alternative interactions you can have, such as directing commenters to your customer service phone numbers or email. Either way silence doesn’t win you any favors.)

There are plenty of other important definitions that I’ll dive into in upcoming articles. For now, treat this one as a primer and reference tool when reviewing your social media metrics. I hope you found this one to be helpful. Let me know if you need any clarification or have any questions whether by email or in the comments. See what I did there?

Works Cited

Buffer. 2017. What Counts As a Video View on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat? The Buffer Guide to Video Metrics Read. Alfred Lua. February. Accessed September 2018. https://www.business2community.com/brandviews/buffer/counts-video-view-facebook-instagram-twitter-snapchat-buffer-guide-video-metrics-01772638

DMR. 2018. “Facebook Statistics By The Numbers (September 2018).” Expanded Ramblings | DMR: Business Statistics. https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/by-the-numbers-17-amazing-facebook-stats/

Google Inc. 2018. Impressions: Definition. https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6320?hl=en

Gottke, Julian. 2018. “Facebook Post Reach Explained.” Quintly, Inc. March 6. Accessed September 12, 2018. https://www.quintly.com/blog/facebook-post-reach-explained

LaRue, Brian. 2017. “What Is Viewability?” AdMonsters. Access Intelligence, Inc. July 5. Accessed September 17, 2018. https://www.admonsters.com/ad-ops-decoder-what-viewability/

MRC. 2016. MRC Mobile Viewable Ad Impression Measurement Guidelines. Industry Report, Digital Research and Standards Media Rating Council, Inc., New York: Media Rating Council, Inc., 20.

Chart Credits

Facebook Video Views Chart. Buffer Inc. https://blog.bufferapp.com/facebook-insights#videos

Facebook Post Reach Chart. Buffer Inc. https://blog.bufferapp.com/facebook-insights#reach

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.

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