Pull Marketing Blog

Social Media Marketing: Quality vs. Quantity Online Relationships

At PullNotPush, we adhere to the HubSpot mantra, ‘if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.’ As part of our Social Media Marketing, we track our online reach through RSS, email, and social media. We recently doubled our following on our Pull Marketing Facebook Page in the course of a week, which was uber-cool, and which got me thinking about the quality vs. quantity concept in social media relationships, especially in the B2B sphere. There’s art & science to all of this, and measurements alone will never accurately assess the total picture of social media influence.

The Business of Measuring Influence

The science is of interest to lots of folks, as evidenced by my Twitter stream today, which featured a slew of tweets about online influence building. Noteworthy players are already invested: see HubSpot’s Twitter Grader, pop in your handle & get your rating (I'm rocking a 90 out of 100! w00t!). And there’s Klout, a San Francisco startup that raised $1.5 million in VC funding this spring, which is dedicated to mathematically measuring the actual quality of Twitter influence through algorithms that measure over 25 variables to rate a Tweeter (I scored a paltry 14. Sadface.)

Today, ConversationAge tweeted an interesting ZDNet blog post by Tom Foremski which cites research from HP’s social computing lab that puts some sophisticated math behind the notion that popularity doesn’t equal influence online. The more followers you have doesn’t necessarily make you the most influential.

Art & Science Merge: More Followers isn't More Influence

This research marries the art and science of the overall influence concept: authentic and compelling content publication, and organic attraction of your products of services through that, will trump spending time & resources fishing for likes and followers to get your count up for its own sake. No one can really measure the quality of your social media prose or the degree to which you are authentic on social media – you have to work that out by finding your voice and discovering your own way to forge meaningful relationships.

With HubSpot’s tools, we can and do measure Social Media's effectiveness in converting leads, which is neat and valuable science. But, we can’t measure the art of creating goodwill amongst your community that will get people to recommend you because they actually like you and what you have to say. And this is one of the coolest things about the social media: we’re witnessing a revolution. The technology backing the internet creates an infrastructure that places the power to influence in the hands of the public. It’s an information meritocracy, which underscores the value of inbound marketing over the old way of interruptively buying your way to people’s attention.

Case Study: The New Born Baby

We have one client, The New Born Baby - a lactation consultant - who does a phenomenal job with her Facebook page. Her followers are engaged, and she posts regular updates on topics of interest, and asks engaging questions which always spark discussion. Her authenticity, obvious expertise, and apparent interest in her field creates a genuine atmosphere on her page, which is immensely helpful to her in making potential customers that might ‘meet’ her first through this page to get comfortable with her.

As someone who came to social media with an attitude that she believes in what she does and she would share about that and try to spark discussion, Debbie has done a stellar job of building a good sized community that is even more valuable pound-for-pound than many other communities of similar size.

How do you measure or interpret the value of what you do on social media? Please comment!

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