Something that has come to mind more and more in recent weeks, especially after reading a really good post (sorry I don’t have the link) is about our obsession with numbers.

Brand marketers are always looking for metrics to benchmark their efforts against.  Sometimes they can be very straightforward such as ‘numbers of items sold’ or ‘enquiries about a product’ and sometimes harder to quantify such as ‘eyeballs’ when it comes to PR pieces and TV adverts as part of brand campaigns.

With the advent of Social Media it has become harder to put efforts and money spent in this space into something that people within companies understand.  Facebook and Twitter have very kindly given us an easy get out on this with ‘fan’ and ‘follower’ counters on each page.

This allows efforts to be measured in terms of how many fans you have, or gain in a certain period of time, the number of comments made on a post and number of ‘likes’ made on posts.

This is great but does it actually mean anything?  If we step back around 15 years when online was first booming and everyone was setting up websites, many were built in with ‘hit counters’ so that we could all easily see how many people had visited that site.

Is this helpful to a brand?  Internally yes and you want to see if people are taking any notice of you and that your investment is actually proving worthwhile.  But as far as a customer facing option it just means that the brand will put more effort into building up that number as they know they will be benchmarked by it.

Since the ‘hit counter’ has disappeared from our view do we rank pages by the number of visits they receive?  Are brands obsessed with the numbers on their site or do they try to make sure it does a great job for the brand, help sell more product and is as consumer friendly as possible?

Now imagine a Facebook without a ‘fan counter’ and Twitter without ‘followers’ being displayed on each page.  Would you concentrate on the same things as we do now?  Would we be ensuring that pages are ‘liked’ by as many people as possible?

Or would we concentrate on what role it plays within the business, what content is going on there and the more useful stats that show how many people are visiting the site and using it in the way that you would like it to be used.

If you want to use it as an open forum and area for collaboration then would you concentrate on making best use of it (ideal) or would you post articles about your product and everything else you can think of that may help get some more likes (what happens now)?

Until we get to the stage when we become less obsessed with the numbers, concentrate on its role for the business (does it even have one?) and how it benefits the consumer then we will continue to struggle to make it into something worthwhile.

Remember that with Facebook’s algorithm for posts being displayed on fans walls, they will only ever see about 5-7% of the posts that you put out there.

How much is a ‘like’ worth??….outside of getting likes on posts to boost your sitting with Facebooks algorithm, nothing really if you aren’t providing anything of use to your business and consumer.