Social Media: Stop it With Pointless Metrics!
Online marketing is of course a new phenomena, when compared with most other forms of marketing, and with it being in its infancy weve all got to be prepared to adapt to new ways of thinking on a regular basis.
Thats not a bad thing, it just means that as marketing platforms mature, you need to stay on top of results tracking to ensure youre not reporting on metrics that are outdated or mis-representative of results.
Social Media Marketers: Im looking at you!
Weve all been there, sat in a meeting with your boss, or client, and theyve said something like: Our competitors have got 40,000 Facebook likes and 20,000 followers on twitter more than we do, we need to double down on our Social Media!.
Facebooks News Feed Rank & Twitters While You Were Away
Facebook has spent years developing their algorithm to float relevant content to the top of peoples news feeds, originally called EdgeRank (although renamed back in 2013 when it was re-released) its fundamentals are pretty clear: the likelihood of any individual seeing your content depends on a few factors, whether they are perceived to find it interesting, how fresh it is, whether your friends with similar interest profiles see it, and whether youve previously liked the originating source.
Twitter has for a long time been much simpler, purely sorting its tweets by time decay and showing you the whole list from every account you follow. Things are highly likely to change pretty soon though, the first clues came when the twitter search functionality moved to popular tweets first, and with current features like while you were away going further to push users feeds away from a straight list and towards a more algorithmically curated list.