Vanity Metrics: What Are They? Don't Settle for the Same (Vanity) Metrics
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Do you know which metrics really matter on social media?
In social media marketing, reports and supporting data are shown to demonstrate the quality of the work done. But which of these are important?
So let’s analyze what vanity metrics are, starting from the basics.
What are vanity metrics?
It is important to know not only what vanity metrics are, but also to understand why this data cannot be used effectively.
Vanity metrics make you look like you’re “performing” on social, but in reality, this data doesn’t help you understand whether your strategy is working. These metrics are exciting if you want to show an improvement in social performance, but they often don’t correlate to anything repeatable or controllable. Vanity metrics are the opposite of actionable metrics, which are data that help your business achieve growth goals. Smart metrics help you make a decision: they provide feedback for your business and help you fine-tune your strategies to attract new customers.
Bold numbers touted as evidence of growth just make headlines. The reason "vanity metrics" get so much flack is because they are overly simplistic, skip context, are often misleading, and don't actually help you improve your strategy in any meaningful way. They are basically data with no substance, just for show.
Such data can give a boost to the ego: for example, if on Instagram one of your photographs receives thousands of likes, but if these do not translate into contacts, real interest or sales...
As Veronica Gentili claims in her guide on how to recognize a charlatan Facebook Marketing consultant , "at the end of the month you don't go and pay your bills with the cart of likes you got on Facebook, right?"
When you make decisions based on these metrics, you can steer your marketing strategies completely wrong. Fortunately, for every vanity metric, there is a corresponding metric that can provide useful information.
How to understand what vanity metrics are?
Here are some of the most common examples of vanity metrics on social media.
Followers and fans: counting followers or communicating the percentage of growth of your fans, thanks to the work of a social media manager, is certainly a misleading statistic and does not reflect the quality of the brand's presence on social media. Furthermore, as we all know, it is really easy to inflate these numbers by purchasing packages of fans. You can easily get ten thousand followers on Instagram for example, with a very low cost, but does this really translate into sales? It is therefore necessary to analyze the quality of the people who follow us on social media and measure their conversions . Having many followers certainly makes us feel interesting, but the metrics to consider are those regarding traffic, engagement and conversions. What percentage of your followers interact with your brand? How much traffic do your social media generate on the site? How many people request information, sign up for the newsletter or make purchases, coming from social media? Sometimes it is better to have a small number of followers but loyal and targeted.
the number of impressions: this too, if not analyzed correctly, can be a vanity metric. We are referring to the number of times people have seen the published content. It is great that people see your content, but it actually means nothing. The metrics to analyze to obtain information are shares (i.e. those who have shown trust in your brand and interest in your content) and the number of conversions generated by social media.
the number of likes : what good is it if your Facebook or Instagram page posts get thousands of likes but don't lead users to a significant conversion? In the early stages of social media marketing, people were obsessed with counting likes (and followers), but doing so runs the risk of creating a "non-audience".
Contemplating ego-inflated data is not a good idea for your marketing. It is important to track metrics that provide real information, that enable decision-making, and that lead to increased revenue.