VANITY METRICS

LET'S SUB FOR SUB

Oh, my god, those words ring in my ears from when I first started on YouTube almost 10 years ago now with my first channel. It was something everyone went around asking, and in all honesty, at the time when I understood very little about the future of social media and especially YouTube, I went along with it. Who wouldn't, it was cool to see your subscriber base pop over that magical 100 mark and then 1000 etc. etc. however, little did we know at the time about vanity metrics.

So, what are vanity metrics firstly? Well, as I've mentioned above, it's those figures on your social media accounts that actually don't matter, especially if you're creating great valuable content for your followers. The idea is to create a group of raving fans who love your content and will share it to their audience and friends for you. Vanity metrics are those that look good on paper but frankly mean absolutely nothing if they're not real.

WHY ARE VANITY METRICS BAD?

I've seen so many accounts across social media that look amazing, but have little to no interaction. Accounts with 100,000 followers but the last piece of content got 3 interactions, or even worse, I saw one account recently from a BIG BRAND, who had over 800,000 followers, but, their content was getting well under 8000 likes every single time. They couldn't even muster 1% interaction on their account. That's shocking, and when you look at the account, it was due to a lack of content, it's just their audience was so skewed that they didn't care about the content they where producing.

1. Because it was pretty much solid sales and no value

2. Because the content they where publishing was not aimed at the audience they have

3. The content for such a big brand didn't really capture any attention

So, how do you overcome this?

That's right, my favourite subject matter when it comes to using social media. How on earth are you meant to build a relationship with your audience, if all you do is SELL SELL SELL, 100% of the time. It amazes me how people still think this is the way to get business, in fact, I regularly make contact with people on things like LinkedIn etc. who instantly drop straight into sales pitch, rather than chatting, or finding out more about me, creating a relationship so I don't just switch off when they come in for the ASK.....not the SELL. Anyway, this is for another blog, back to vanity metrics.

You're trying to build an amazing group of followers, as the brilliant Ian Dickson called them once when we were chatting at a 4N networking event, your RAVING FANS. Yes this may be a smaller group of people than if you went running off asking sub for sub, follow for follow, but, they are a group of people who appreciate your content, enjoy it, get value from it, and will more than likely tell others about it, and even more importantly, when it comes to asking them to do something for you, i.e. take a look at my book, I've just started an online course that covers some of the stuff I've told you etc. etc. they're more than happy to take a look and potentially buy, so then becoming a paying customer too.

If you'd like to discuss more the idea of vanity metrics, or just get in touch so I can have a FREE chat with you about your brand building going forwards, drop me a line [email protected] I'd love to speak to you.