What is the value of 20,000 likes?

As so often happens, topics seem to arrive in waves in my social media feeds. This week is no different. ‘How to achieve success using content marketing and social media’ is a topic that is ever-present of course, but this week it seemed to appear more than usual.

I read a number of commentaries from so-called digital gurus, disruptors, brand experts and other kinds of experts, and on the whole, it is not hard to understand why a recent survey found around 80% of marketers in the US are not able to quantify the value of their social media efforts. I would not be surprised if similar percentages were found around the world.

As with most things in life, success is relative. As are the 20,000 likes.

So what's the issue?

There is a massive difference between digital and real-world consumer behaviour. The main problem is that many marketers believe the way social media works simply reflects the real-world. However, because social media measurement is based on certain assumptions about on-line behaviour, it doesn't work the way many people think it does.

Let's look at engagement, the most valuable currency in social media. There are numerous articles about how to measure engagement across different social channels, and almost as numerous are the number of vendors offering their own unique measurement tools. However in essence, they all use the same predefined assumption in ‘reading’ your on-line audience behaviours.

For example, engagement is meant to measure how much people care about your content, but since you can't really measure people's feelings on-line, the next best option (using Instagram as an example) is based on liking a photo. Granted, actions like sharing and commenting (referencing Facebook) require a little more interaction, but sharing is as simple as liking and a quick comment using predictive text is pretty effortless. But even if we do measure ‘likes’, we still have no idea whether the reaction is altruistic or self-promoting!

There is also a whole set of analysis you can do on this 'data' that delivers supposed 'metrics' about your audience. Sounds very scientific but, if the data is inherently flawed, surely no amount of analysis will leave you more informed to make objective decisions?

At this point, your 20,000 likes are starting to look largely meaningless.

How can you get more value out of your social media marketing?

There is no magic to this. Yes, there are lots of tricks to increase follower count and 'engagement', but anyone can buy reach. As highlighted (again) last week, marketing is an integrated play book. You need to combine new and (spoiler alert) traditional approaches. That's why it's called a 'MIX'. A good marketer should be like a chef, tweaking ingredients of the mix to get the best result.

You also need to really, really, really think hard about why you are doing what you are doing.

While digital marketing might appear fun, instant and creative, unless there is a real structure and purpose to the activity – with a set of measurements to identify success or failure - failure is pretty much guaranteed.

A key part of the structure is defining three important areas upfront:

Acquisition - how will you acquire traffic for whatever is being created? The ‘earned, owned, paid media’ question.

Behaviour - what will an audience see or watch, what actions should they take, and is there an experience to be created?

Outcomes - what outcome will help deliver value to the business? Not every outcome will be a conversion to a sale, but it should be part of the customer journey.

Any activity has to tie into a broader set of business objectives and the activity must have clearly defined KPIs. That also means setting the parameters for success upfront by identifying targets for each KPI.

So, coming back to the 20,000 likes.

They can mean a lot. Or they can mean very little. They will only have value if they are the outcome of a structured plan. Very little happens by random chance. I used this example from a post on Instagram that went viral. 700,000 views, 20k likes, an extra 6k followers and well over 1,500 comments. Sounds peachy, but I'm still waiting for an answer to my question about what the KPIs were and the real outcome.

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