How Social Media Metrics Can Deceive You

Social media metrics can be a very good determining factor on how successful your website is to the online community. However, this number alone is something websites owners should not be focusing of as this can be quite deceiving. Be careful of the ways those metrics can deceive you.

Your brand is something your friend and followers might not care about

It might look good on paper to have a considerable amount of followers on Twitter however, these followers are can be useless if half of them are spam accounts while the other half aren’t interested in your brand at all. This is quite true especially since anyone can click a “like” or a “follow” button. It is best to establish genuine relationship and engagement with your followers with regards to your brand.

Social traffic many not result to brand engagement

For website owners, traffic isn’t everything. Of course traffic is important but this number alone is not enough to produce satisfying results. Be certain to analyze that traffic to determine its actual value.

It is possible to receive social shares from bots

More shares lead to a good thing and this is considered to be a general rule. With that being said, not all shares are equal. Don’t go assuming directly that a human is totally invested in your brand with him sharing your content to their followers and fans. This is indeed quite true with the existence of bots and they can mess up the figures easily.

Links are more valuable than shares

Links greatly outweigh shares due to the fact that they pass more authority to your site and your chance of generate referral traffic over a longer period of time is becomes relatively higher. This is why aside from looking at your shares you also need to pay close attention to the number of links that you are getting.

Your reputation can be harmed with brand mentions and shares

Content getting share does not necessarily that those who did all the sharing are intended to favor your brand. Criticizing your content or mentioning your name in an attempt to slander you is also a possibility and you should be wary about it as it can result to a negative publicity.

 

Impressions does not instantly result to you getting seen

Metric to track how many newsfeeds your content and posts have shown up for can be found through “impressions” which most social media platforms offer today. With that being said, this is not the actual number of times your post was seen but the number of opportunities for your post to be seen.