Good morning and welcome to the Monday morning marketing podcast. I'm Esther
and I'm Melanie.
And today we're talking about vanity metrics. What are they? And why are they not important? But first, let's hear from our sponsors.
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Hmm. Well, all metrics are important certainly when it comes to monitoring your social media. But what we mean by vanity metrics is the ones people worry about when they really shouldn't give us an example.
Yes. So the number of people who like your page or the number of followers that you have on Twitter or the number of connexions you have on LinkedIn, if they're not people who are interacting with you, then it's just vanity to say that, oh, I have 47000 followers, for example.
Melanie
And if they're not, you know, connecting or understanding or retweeting or sharing or having anything really to do with what you're standing for it's vanity, just pure vanity.
It is. Right. So, yes, it's nice to see the numbers going up. It is nice to see that people are finding you and finding your page or your profile or, you know, we're talking across multiple platforms here. But the real metrics that you should be measuring are the interactions.
Yeah, so and not just that, it's when you've created this particular brand or message that you're putting out is you've got to understand who your audience is. And if you're spreading yourself too thinly across different audiences, they're not really getting what you were standing for, what you represent. And it actually messes with the algorithm. Completely,
oh, let them. OK, so you touched algorithm go, that's yours. I don't like algorithms. Tell people that maybe don't know what the dreaded algorithm is all about it.
Well, it's very difficult to tell anybody about algorithms, to be honest with you, because they change so frequently. But every single social media platform out there has one, as does the Google search as well. That has an algorithm and they're all affected by so many different things they're affected by. Let me Google, Google algorithm, for instance, is affected by the types of websites that are being found by search engine optimisation and on Facebook and on Twitter and on LinkedIn and all of those. They're affected by the amount of people that are online, the type of posts they're putting up with their video, you know, with a distrait text post or links. So much going on. And you think about it, Esther and anybody else is listening out there every single time you open your phone. And let's face it, most people do, check the social on their phones
multiple times.
Exactly. And, you know, this algorithm is fighting with who you last interacted with, who you lost, commented on, you know, is a paid ad going on in your area that people are targeting you. So this is massive algorithms that you are being affected by every single time you open your phone and you can mess with it to a certain degree and some you can't. And if you're having all these hundreds of people that have nothing to do with your page, you know, as a like or as a follower and, you know, you've only got 200 people that actually bother with your content at all. Facebook are going to say, well, this is not very interesting. They're not very you know, they're not keeping the audience engaged. So they actually drop your reach on your page because you've got like ten thousand people following you and two hundred people interacting.
Yeah. And sometimes people want to boost their vanity. They want to boost the numbers of followers by doing like, share and tag.
Sometimes that work, so...
Sometimes. But then you're not going to get you know, if you're offering a give-away, that's something unrelated to your page, you know, like, say, you and I were to give away an iPad. How is that related to our business would have to be related to the business. Otherwise it's just people liking and sharing and tagging because they want the iPad and they don't care about our business, you know,
but not thoughtful enough to remove themselves afterwards.
Well, people forget. I mean, people are very forgetful. Let's be honest here, you know, and there is a way, though, for businesses to go in themselves and remove those people
on certain platforms. Yes.
Yeah, OK. Yes, it could be scary to go from 10000 to 200, but it might be completely necessary. But it's always important to check your analytics
totally.
Right. So analytics are very important and they are the backbone to your business. I mean, if you don't know where people are coming in for what they're coming to look at, then you won't be knowing what content is working and what your audience is interested in. So value above vanity. Oh my. Oh I know. I just came up with that was that good?.
I'm going to write that down.
But like Melanie was saying, you need to know who your audience is. Go back and listen to the one to the podcast that we did about our buyer persona or customer persona. And you know, the I know a lot of people have been very. Affected or touched by that episode, and they're taking their time and going through it and maybe multiple listens to figure out who their audience is, because it's one of the key points that you need to know before you go into everything else.
I mean, when you and you set up a platform, you obviously want to reach as many people as possible. I get that. And sometimes we can go viral with products or they say something that's done a really good Facebook life. But if the relevancy of that Facebook life is gone and you never, ever do one like again, that's the other thing actually is, is live's. Some people say, oh, I've had all these impressions and all these people who've watched it. But if there's no call to action at the end of it and, you know, kind of little pointless really doing this, you can build awareness. That's great. You know, there are levels is awareness, consideration and then conversion, which is synonymous with Facebook, let's say. But, you know. There has to be a point, and that's what vanity metrics are. There is no point.
No, no. And yes, it's nice to say, oh, I have so many followers, I have so many people that, you know, have at one point liked my page. But if they're not interacting, there's no point. There's really no point in having them there.
Yeah. I mean, how can we change this? Like, we've been slighting people who talk about vanity metrics. So how can we help people change this?
Like I said, value giving, value seeing who interacts. I don't think it's necessary to go in today if you haven't been posting for the last week, two weeks, month, year, and just remove people who haven't been interacting, you've given them nothing to interact with, start giving them content to interact with, and then start filtering off the ones who aren't your audience.
And the other thing is there's lots of apps now that help you understand your audience better. There are you know, there's obviously the analytics that's native to every single platform that you can go through. But if you can deliver, change things up for yourself and start with a proper strategy. And that's another podcast, you know, if you can. So a proper, decent strategy, you can try and re-engage and reinvigorate those people that you got this weeks or months ago or even years ago. You can do email campaigns, you can do lives. You can invite guests to come and talk about subjects that matter to your audience. And, you know, it's lovely. It is lovely to get new likes and followers. I like getting new likes and followers,
of course. And that's, you know, that's where the vanity comes in, because you get all fuzzy and warm inside. But I know you might. I mean, come on, let's be honest. If somebody famous comes out and follows, you do not get all warm and fuzzy inside.
I do actually especially on Twitter.
Yeah. Yeah. So it's I mean, I know people who have deleted their Facebook page in order to start afresh and not do the like, share, you know, get the super likes that way. And they're not doing any ads and they're not visiting the page in any way. And that's the other extreme. OK, there's no need to do that either because there are people who have followed you from the very beginning who are still interested in what you have. Maybe they haven't interacted openly, but they are watching and eventually they may even buy from you.
And, you know, this is the time, you know, this is the absolute right time to reignite their passion and your strategy. In fact, it really is no better time to sort yourselves out and create a plan that's going to, you know, bolster your your vision, your plans. And and if you can just explain to people what you do, how you do it, where you do it and how to reach you, honestly, that would be the best thing right now.
Yeah, definitely. Call to action. Call to action. Call to action without being filthy.
That's how it, isn't it.
That's for another episode. Thanks for joining us today, guys. Hope you've had a good week. And we hope that you'll join us again next week.Bye bye
bye.