Many social media experts tout the brilliance and viability of Facebook. They shout about ‘like’ metrics, friend counts and login durations as being the key to evaluating the return on investment of the social media platform. I propose that these metrics are nothing more than vanity and prove absolutely nothing more than the mythology of Facebook’s dominance.
So you have published your product/business’s page on Facebook. Now you engage in a campaign to garner as many ‘likes’ as you can because you read somewhere or hired someone that informed you that you must do this. At some point you earn thousands of like but less than 1% commentary on your page. In effect you have a vapid following on your professional Facebook page that does extremely little to enhance your brand and absolutely nothing to further the original goal of social network which is interaction. Sadly liking something does little to improve the brand’s real presence or recognition.
There is a similar phenomenon in promiscuously befriending everybody and their brother. Just because you have hundreds of friend on a social network does not mean that they are actually your friends. How many of these social media friends do you engage with on a monthly let alone daily basis? How many of them really merit the term friend? Sadly my personal impression is that as a result of the current trend in social media the term friend no longer bares the meaning it once did.
A vapid following on your professional Facebook page that does extremely little to enhance your brand
Finally let’s examine the latest metric that has sprung out of the Facebook camp: “Logon Duration.” This is the duration of time spent logged into a social networking site. I can honestly say that this means absolutely nothing and should not be a determination of anything other than the laziness of the site’s users. In my own home there are four Facebook users and three of them are logged in practically 24/7/365. In fact all of us have the requisite Facebook app installed on our Android phones as well as iPods and iPads. However none of us are actually cognizant of what is happening on the site at say 3 AM. The research on average login duration is so severely skewed that it amazes me that anyone would have postulated it in the first place.
So how should do you think we should measure our Social Media influence?
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