Don't be Snowed. Total Fans and Followers Mean Nothing

I recently blogged that people aren't engaging with Brands on Facebook. I used MTV's 100million total fans for their Facebook pages and got into their numbers. Then I saw this Forbes article linked on the Twitter.

Stop being conned by the Media, Marketers, Guru's. No one gives a flying crap about Fans or Followers. They mean nothing to your business.

The C-Suite knows this and that is why they don't care about Social. They didn't in 2010 and they do not today. Why is this? 

What is important is activity. You need to forget 800mil Facebook accounts and 450mil Twitter accounts. Next time someone says your customer is on Facebook or Twitter the fact is they are not. And if they are it is not for very long each day.

When I went to MTV's main page with 33mil fans I find over 300K in the Talking About Section. Talking about is the number each week adding up all the comments and likes to your brand page posts, plus all the times people add their own comment and those get liked on your page. This is not UNIQUE visitors! If I comment once per day then they count me as 7.

So take 300,000 and divide by 7 and you get just over 40,000 actions per day. Hey that is nice right? But MTV needs millions of unique viewers world wide since MTV is a GLOBAL BRAND. So it could be 300,000 unique people who each took one action, or it could be 10,000 hardcore people who take 4-5 actions per day on the brand page.

So that 33mil Fans? Means nothing. It is nice to have them. But you can't reach them all with your page. You can reach maybe 0.5-1% a day in terms of them seeing your posts and comments. Not bad. That is 150k to 300k impressions. But not driving viewership or profits. 

I once blogged about starting with your goal and working backwards. Imagine the CEO of MTV coming to you and saying 'I want to have 10,000 to 40,000 actions per day on our page. How many fans do we need for that?' and you respond '33 million'.

You need to stop including gross numbers and start looking at 'how many are you really reaching'. 

Stop saying total accounts and think how many are actually using this network right now when I want to reach an existing or potential customer. 

You need to stop thinking you reach all your fans and start thinking is having X number engaging with me a big enough pay off vs my effort which could be focused elsewhere.