I too agree that your success can’t be measured by the number of followers you have on social medias.Social medias are the best way to communicate and get yourself public and boost your business, Yes…that’s the point where we need to think about the number of followers you have. If they are following you simply because they accidentally slipped into your page and saw a follow button. If it’s not giving your business a boom financially (finance is the first preference when you do business…I think) then no use of showing the world that you have 4000 followers.

As in the case of optimizing a site for search engines (if your site is ranked above 5, but the clicks are not converting you any sales then what’s the purpose of saying you are being listed No.1) Even if you have 10 users and they keep in touch with you, that’s much much better than the 3000 or 4000 dead followers.

Anybody can create their facebook page or twitter feeds, but it has to be strategically focused on the objective of the purpose it was being created for. Sales conversion is what you think when you launch a social media page, then it doesn’t matter how many followers you have.

This is really very good blogs. I got very good information. I prefer to read it in future.

But I don’t agree that you should judge a social media campaign as success ” by who is following, what their role is, and if they are part of your client’s target audience” unless that was your business goal for the campaign.

I think campaigns online/offline/socialmedia/intergalactic must be established with a business goal in mind, and the metrics are derived from that business goal.

For example, suppose a museum wants to increase the proportion of young (16-21 year olds) people coming to the museum. They might build a campaign via facebook. They can measure the total number of fans, they can measure the number of “qualified” leads in that fan base. But neither of those measures tell you whether the campaign was succesful for the business. You can only tell that by seeing that there are more young people coming through the door, and you could measure the social media campaign contribution to that by using a voucher system for the tickets or a sample survey of visitors.

Because that’s the other thing, social media campaigns should not run in isolation – in the example above the offline marketing such as a poster campaign should be integrated, and even the exhibition itself (the product) could be created in a way to involve young people.

The best I’ve seen on this subject comes from Olivier Blanchard (http://www.slideshare.net/thebrandbuilder/olivier-blanchard-basics-of-social-media-roi).

Overall you’re right though, fan/follower numbers are not by themselves very interesting.

The real goals lie elsewhere, social media is just a platform to leverage those ‘goals’ or KPI’s which already exist. It’s just up to clients and agencies to work out what they are and collate them into a workable strategy.

So now 4000 followers have quickly been twittled down to 100 regular engaging followers. Doesn’t look so impressive now does it?

Agencies MUST reinforce this message with clients “Social media is not about the number of followers” and “Success is not based on the number of followers”

There are many great posts, tools and metrics available out there to measure success of social media. At the end of the day the agency must educate themselves on what works best for their clients requirements and work up an agreed strategy/plan.