Under the Social Media Influence
March 19th, 2010 |
The Million Follower Fallacy: Audience Size Doesn’t Prove Influence on Twitter, on Read Write Web, cites a recent survey that found “Twitter follower count is somewhat of a meaningless metric when it comes to determining influence.” I was excited that finally someone realized that these numerical measures were totally unrelated to influence. My excitement was short lived, however, as I read:
“They then went on to measure various statistics about these accounts, including audience size, retweet influence and mention influence. The conclusion? Those with the largest number of followers may be ‘popular’ Twitterers, but that’s not necessarily related to their influence. High follower counts don’t always mean someone is being retweeted or mentioned in any meaningful ways.”
“Retweet influence”? “Mention influence”? I have yet to see any of these things linked directly to real influence. The primary definition of influence is “the capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on or produce effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of others.” It’s difficult to show that a 140-character item flying by in a Twitter stream or RSS feed has, by this definition, any influence whatsoever, and if one doesn’t, one million 140-character items don’t either.
The ability to measure a path from any marketing or advertising effort to a successful endpoint is extremely difficult, and has plagued professional online marketers for over a decade. The tools and expert analysis required to do this correctly are out of the reach of most individuals and small companies.
That’s why people use web metrics instead. Because its’ too hard to measure the things that matter. How high can I get on a Google search? How much traffic can I get to my blog or web site? How many people played my video or downloaded my free game?
These are “soft” metrics. And it’s disingenuous to call any of these things “influence.” They are raw web metrics, and in many cases, hard to authenticate. (There are multiple types of RT for example. Which ones are “better”? Do you count them all?)
They are useful, but they are removed from your business goals, which might be things like grow revenue, add new subscribers, sell into new markets. But how do you tie these objectives, and gauge your success in achieving them, by counting tweets? I’m not sure you can.
| Sphere This |
right on.
I would like to point out though, that although there’s no such thing as influence metrics, there can be influential people who tweet.
That doesn’t mean they are influential because they tweet, just like the President of the U.S. isn’t influential because he uses a phone.
Comment by vruz — March 19, 2010 @ 1:02 pm
I wrote about this myself not too long ago:
http://twitter-fail.com/2010/02/20/the-secret-to-fewer-followers/
I used twitter karma and found out that about 20% of my followers are inactive (defined as no activity for over 100 days). It was a bit less than this for the people I was following.
I decided to do some pruning. I blocked/unblocked these people. This forces them to unfollow me (they are welcome to refollow if they rejoin and miss me). I’ve started added the people I was following, that I am giving the boot, to a “dead accounts” list. If they come back I can follow again.
But that 20% if for someone like me. I actively vet my followers. I’ve blocked nearly 7,000 people so far. Take some of these celebrity types who get tons of followers. I bet their inactive accounts are even higher.
Anyway, this is a long way to say that I think the quality of the people I follow (and that follow me) are higher than most. I have less than 4,000 followers but if I post a link bit.ly says 40 people (on average) follow it.
I have no idea if that’s good or not. I might have higher higher response with more followers, but honestly, if I didn’t want you follow I probably don’t care if you check out my links.
The numbers are all wrong. I would be willing to bet I could get 100k followers in 100 days, doing all the clicks by hand, but you’d have to be willing to pay me 100k to prove it. Follower counts mean little. It’s the interaction that matters.
Comment by Christopher L. Jorgensen — March 22, 2010 @ 9:54 am