I Am Not Impressed By Your Number of Followers

By Sanya Weathers

Community work is notoriously hard to quantify. Not easily, anyway. But as a result, many people embraced the easy figures that came with MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. If you had ten friends today, and you had twenty friends a week later, your community manager could give you the number ten as a benchmark and retire to her office for a refreshing caffeinated beverage. If she presented you with the number 12 in another week, she must be doing “better.” Fetching an 8 would be a sign she was doing “worse.”

This is insanity.

First of all, unless you resort to some unsavory methods, the number of new friends will level off after awhile. (Do not resort to the unsavory methods.) Second of all, what do those numbers even mean?

I’m a fan of Walgreen’s. I do not actually care about Walgreen’s in the slightest, and when I do need a pharmacy, I go to the CVS right next to the grocery store. Walgreen’s once offered a coupon for some number of free photo prints in return for becoming a fan at the exact point in time when I needed to print out a few hundred photos. It was worth driving a half mile out of my way to save the money on the photos. But it’s not worth it when I can get my prescription, after I pick up my bread and milk, without moving the car. Their relationship with me on Facebook just hasn’t been strong enough to change my consumer habits – and it probably can’t be.

Pardon me while I go un-fan Walgreen’s.

Walgreen’s “gained” a customer last year, and “lost” one today, and the loss doesn’t reflect at all on Walgreen’s, or the community person that Walgreen’s pays to acquire fans.

The number of fans or followers does not and never has represented something quantifiable, for all that there’s a nice clear number attached. What you’ve got on your social media networks is raw potential.

–    The potential for relationships. Are you engaging those users in conversations? Do you talk to them? Do they talk to you?

–    The potential to improve. Are you taking the things they say and using them to create opportunity, or otherwise improve the customer experience?

–    The potential to make people feel like part of the team. If you are taking customer posts to heart and using them to make changes to your product or to the customer experience, are you getting that information back to them? If you didn’t complete the loop, it might as well not have happened.

–    The potential to communicate. Your communication over social media should not be as formal as it might be in your press releases or your corporate website. At the same time, your competitors are also your followers and “friends.” (Yet another reason your number isn’t what you think it is, right?)

–    The potential to gain an edge over the competition. Walgreen’s probably can’t pry me away from CVS no matter how charming they are on Facebook. I mean, I really hate moving my car and I really love one stop shopping. But games, social media properties, and actual communities can create value for customers, when they create situations where all the customer has to do is click the mouse.

Racking up the numbers is only your first step if you want the social connections to have value.