And you and I will prove this together.
As soon as I publish this post, I am going to tweet out the link to my 22,000 followers on Twitter. When that happens, click this link to see what SiteMeter says the traffic looks like for today. This will give us a good idea of how many of the 22,000 people following me on Twitter are REALLY following me and what level of engagement I have with those 22,000 people.
I can tell you right now that at best probably 1 or 2 percent of those people will click that link I tweet out. Think about that, of the 22,000 people following me, only 1 or 2 percent are likely to click on a link I share. And honestly, that’s pretty good.
So that means that well over 90% of the people following me aren’t clicking on links I share. So is it more accurate to say that 22,000 people are following me, or is it actually more like a few hundred?
Here’s a second example of how the numbers in social media can be deceiving.
That graph shows the number of feed readers that Feedburner says I have at The Viral Garden over the last month. This is how FeedBurner explains the number it shows for # of feed readers:
FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.
Subscribers counts are calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers, aggregators, and bots on the market to make additional inferences.
Now, this is the problem I have. First, notice that the # of feed readers (the number shown in green on top of the above graph) has been steadily rising over the last month. A month ago, it was at 5,238, yesterday it was up to 7,359. That’s about a 40% increase in the number of feed subscribers Feedburner reports for The Viral Garden in the last month.
The problem: I have only written ONE post on The Viral Garden in the last month. In fact, I have only written FOUR posts there in the last FIVE months.
So does it make any sense for Feedburner to say that over 7,000 people are accessing my feed every day, even though that feed hasn’t put out a new post in over 2 weeks? Doesn’t common sense suggest that most of the people that are subscribed to my feed would only be accessing it when a new post is published?
To further put the FeedBurner numbers in doubt, let’s look at the actual traffic to The Viral Garden over the last 12 months, according to SiteMeter:
Up until the middle of May, I was keeping up a regular schedule of 2-3 posts a week over at The Viral Garden. But since the middle of May, I have left 4 posts there. Notice that the above SiteMeter graph reflects this, as traffic fell sharply in May, and again in June, before settling down to roughly half the traffic levels it was up till May. This is exactly what you would expect, volume of posts fell sharply starting in May, and the traffic did as well.
So again, how is the number of feed readers steadily RISING, according to FeedBurner? Does that make any sense?
These are just two examples, but I think it points to a larger problem: Too many of the numbers being used to measure social media seem to be way off. And I think that because so many of these numbers are inaccurate, it is keeping more companies from investing more dollars in social media efforts. Because if they don’t know to accurately measure how many people are seeing their message, or following them, or reading their content, or interacting with them, how can they justify spending dollars on ghosts?
They can’t. And we shouldn’t expect them to. We need better numbers, and until we get them, social media strategists such as myself need to keep pushing for them, and explain to our clients where the shortcomings are.
We can do MUCH better and the future of this industry depends on us finding a way to do so.
Glad you’ve raised this – hope more of your 22,000 click on the link.
I deliberately tweet about something or share a link on Facebook and then I do ntohing for a few days. I check with my Sitemeter figures and for the day I shared the link I’ll get a little spike in my visiter numbers. I know this is a bit timeconsuming 9another task for the VA perhaps ??) but it enables monitoring of the impact a link achieves.
Hey Gillian, I think this speaks to the misconception many people and companies have about the numbers in social media. For example, many companies think if they have 500 followers, that these are 500 people that are honestly INTERESTED in the them and actively engaged with them most of the time. In reality, only a small fraction of that number would likely act on a call to action they placed.
It’s kinda like living in a town with a population of 22,000. Sure you may know some of those people, but odds are its a fraction of 22,000, and the number that are your close friends might only be a handful or so.
Shoot, Mack, I’m a huge fan, and I don’t even click on every link you tweet out. I mean, it would almost be creepy if I did, right? Who really goes back through someone’s tweets and clicks on everything they put out? You’re right that 20,000 is deceiving, but I’m not sure how many people really believe that everyone of their followers is freakishly watching everything they do.
Ian you are right, but I bet most people assume the engagement/interaction level they have with their followers is much higher than 1-2%.
Or maybe part of the issue is the larger number. If I could only follow 50 people, they would almost all be close friends/contacts, and that engagement level would skyrocket.
I would guess that MARKETERS would understand the engagement level is closer to 2% since that’s what they learn and teach. I was always told that a 10% response to any marketing campaign was a huge success and to be happy with 2%. And of course, the less targeted/specific the promotion, the lower that percentage.
Maybe the average user would be surprised, but I wouldn’t expect a company to anticipate any higher response via Twitter than via magazine ads or fliers or mailers or …..
I agree with your premise Mack but…
1. How many people are monitoring your tweet stream at 10am CST? On the first work day back after a holiday weekend? Fair twist? Twitter is about immediacy. And while I follow you and have you in a group/list I monitor, if @BethHarte & @TheBrandBuilder had not RT’d this tweet, I probably wouldn’t have noticed since I have my nose is to the grindstone this am.
2. Your RSS feed subscriptions can be going up simply due to more people finding you from older posts using search. That’s part of the point of using a blog to support your thought leadership efforts right? And the more exposure you get, the more subscribers you will have regardless of how frequent you post. The question is how many will stay subscribers if you fail to post more frequently.
However, I agree that there are too many numbers thrown wildly around about social media use that are meaningless. It’s all about context though.
Hey Jeffrey, thanks for the thoughts, here’s mine:
1 – I watch my Twitter referral traffic religiously. Twitter is the top referring site to this blog and most days I average 100-200 visitors from Twitter. At best, that’s 1% of my followers.
2 – I can buy your point about search leading to additional subscriptions. But I don’t think it would to the extent that FB is recording. I just checked, and in the last month, I have had 1,994 visitors to The Viral Garden coming from search, and during that same time frame, I have gained 2,340 feed subscribers, according to FeedBurner. So even if 100% of the visitors from search converted into a subscriber, that still leaves a gap of 346 people. And I think we can both guess that nowhere near 100% of the search traffic converted.
1. Yes but how many times a day do you tweet the same link to the same post? If 100-200 people clicked on it from your stream, that’s pretty good considering not everyone (that is a serious follower) is watching every minute. You know as well as anyone that attention spans are short. Wait not even a minute and most are on to another tweet and another link. Plus the link will probably be re-purposed to a different url shortner thus making tracking the original tweeted link difficult.
2. Agreed. But I’m sure it’s substantial. The ration of subscribers I receive on my blog from search and older posts sources is significantly higher than I do from current ones.
Jeffrey I normally tweet out a link to my post 3-5 times a day. So some of that referral traffic isn’t even coming from my followers. So 1-2% is high end for engagement with my followers.
I agree we can get carried away with numbers but I also believe in this case you are not looking at all the numbers available. Ok, 2 percent of your followers will click on this link…but what about a link you sent yesterday or an hour ago? Are they the same 2 percent or do they vary. If it is 1 percent who consistently click and another 1 percent that changes all the time, that’s a very different number than 2 percent no?
I’m more in it for the long haul than worried about each individual post…but then I have the luxury of not having to report to a CFO. The only number I care about is did business increase this year or not.
Traci that’s a good point, some of the referral traffic I will get today will actually be from links to posts here that I shared a few days ago or maybe even a few weeks ago.
But I still don’t think it would boost the click rate up very high. Maybe 5% if I am lucky.
The point is, I think companies aren’t realizing how unreliable some of these numbers can be. We think about ‘friending’ someone, and that term, ‘friend’ implies to us that this is someone that we are well….friends with. But as is often the case, it can be someone that we barely know, if at all.
Maybe it’s not just that we need to better understand the numbers, but perhaps the terms we use to represent those numbers, as well.
There are several issues in this post Mack. It may simply be that our expectations are too high, or that we don’t yet know what exactly to formulate a metric with.
1) Twitter is like terrestrial radio. Just because you have 22,000 people following you doesn’t mean they are all simultaneously listening 24/7. They may come and go. If they don’t have their radio on when you are broadcasting, they won’t hear your message. When they do have the radio on, depending on how many other people they following who are tweeting at the same time as you, your message get drowned out by all the other noise. Twitter is a shotgun approach, so it seems unreasonable that there would be anything more than 1% response rate, much like you would find in terrestrial radio or direct mail campaigns. Also, people are highly unlikely to go to your Twitter stream and scroll back to see every tweet you have sent.
2) Re the Feed stats. They may not be reading it every day, but if they have put your RSS link into their reader, then every time they open their reader it will check to see if there is an update (or if they use a web based one like Google Reader then it will do it automatically). So if they have your RSS feed in their Outlook for example and they open that up every day to do their email, then Outlook will check everyday to see if there are any updates to all the RSS feeds. This is why the number stays consistent, and may be going up (as more people use their readers). Also like Jeff said, People may have found some of the older entries useful (evergreen content) and subscribed to the RSS feed as a result (look at the site usage of those visitors, are they sticking around for a while or is there a high bounce rate? If they are coming in off a search and finding relevant content, they may be sticking around longer and subscribing, so even though the overall numbers are down, you may be getting a higher percentage of readers who are actually consuming the content). This will also push the numbers up. Even with that explanation though, the numbers still smell funny. Who really knows? This seems to be one of those metrics that are big picture indicators rather than granular causation.
Like you said, the numbers are whacky, and unfortunately, there isn’t an across the board metric that everyone uses – everyone seems to look at a different number (metric) depending on their individual intent & goals (It also depends on whether they view it as a marketing expense, a customer service expense, or whatever). Until we can figure out a way to formulate a meaningful metric that demonstrates cause-and-effect of their social strategies, it will be a tougher sell than it needs to be.
Hey Bruce!
1 – I think my main issue is that companies especially need to understand what that 22,000 number represents. They need to know that it does NOT represent 22,000 people that I am ‘influential’ to. It represents 22,000 people that have some level of connection with me. That connection could be extremely close, or it could be so lax that it could barely be called a connection.
It’s like your city having a population of 22,000. How many of those people do you REALLY know? How many are close friends? Same thing, just because you live in a group of 22,000 people doesn’t mean you have any level of attachment to them or them to you.
2 – Your explanation about the feed readers and email automatically pinging my feed makes complete sense, and helps explain why the numbers are so off. But my point is, FeedBurner seems to be telling me that over 7,000 people are accessing my feed every single day, even though that feed has only published one post in the last month or so.
Obviously, that can’t be true,
Oops – I hit submit before I was done.
Another thing Mack is that it will be tough to track, for this experiment, which of YOUR followers are coming in off your tweet alone based on the number of retweets & other people promoting the entry to their followers. So the Twitter referrals will be skewed by that.
Exactly right Bruce, and I wish I had a way to track that. Would also be interesting to know cause it could help me understand how my tweets are building awareness for my content.
This post shows to me how much we do have a long way to go and how much I have to go. I have to balance my approach to analyzing stats. At first it was a big thing I would check constantly. That wound up being distracting to me. I realized where the actual value in my blog came at recent conferences this year where complete strangers came up to me and said “Are you Jonathan Saar? I read your posts all the time..thank you for all you do” Those are the stats that touched my heart. If I am understanding your post correctly Mack, we need not get overly involved in numbers since they could be sending a false positive. Thanks for the stats!
Hey Mack – Count me among the crowd that is completely unsure what numbers matter and what don’t. Google analytics vs. WordPress stats vs. Compete vs. Klout vs. # or quality of comments vs. Alexa vs. Technorati. So many to choose
I get happy about a certain bit of news and then saddened by news from another. In the end, I try to measure them all. But alas am failing. 🙂
Heading to Blog World to try and figure it all out. Great post and look forward to your guest post on MENG Blend.
When I get too deep into data analysis I always end up with a headache, and you sum up exactly why.
It can be very misleading, I am a follower of yours on Twitter, but I don’t click many of your posts links there ’cause I follow your RSS feed, and that screws data around some more.
What I did lately is to make specific Bit.ly links for my posts with encoded UTM values for times and the kind of title I use, for example, if I use one kind of title for the post and I post it at midnight CET, I put an utm_medium variable value of “typeA00”, if I post it using a second version of the title at 6am CET I use “typeB06”, and so on. It’s like running a split A/B test using Bit.ly to see which one is more effective. I keep track of all of this in a neat Google Spreadsheet file I put up (yes, I am a geek).
Paranoid? Maybe, but it helped me a great way into finding out exactly at which time it’s usually better to tweet out my new blog posts (with 150-200% differences in clicks).
Mack,
The definitional issue has been with us for a long time, going all the way back to online communities, static web pages, and early social media tools. Each platform has a slightly different definition of a unique visitor/user/member, page view count, etc. Remember when the definition of a visit was once a visitor clicked to a second page (Webtrends circa 2000)? First we understated the traffic metrics’ importance, now we overstate it.
We teach our clients to focus on three categories of metrics: traffic, behavior, and value. Each successive category is more important to the organization using the social media tools. We’d love to see the social media world move away from scoring themselves primarily with traffic metrics because in most cases they are not only a small piece of the puzzle, but they can also be manipulated easily.
But what rings true is the popping of the idea that followers equates influence. I wrote about this in a blog post titled “Gaming the System: Why Friends and Follower Counts Don’t Matter.” I won’t spam your comments, it’s available on our site. But the same points are raised with an example starting from a tweet I read from Jeremiah Owyang and then proved how easy it is to manipulate your follower counts on Twitter with little effort.
This sounds like a great topic for BlogChat btw…
Numbers are just number. No analytics numbers are perfectly accurate–analysts know this, and in order to extract any meaning or insight you need people who really understand what it means to make sense of those numbers.
The numbers don’t really need to change.. What we need is more people who understand that 22,000 followers does not mean 22,000 clicks on each links and that sometimes numbers like subscriptions are mere indicators rather than solid fact.
Mack, Nice example here and good points on the technical side from Bruce and Jeffrey. One thing about RSS and Twitter feeds, from one who’s not a prolific poster: Not sure I notice when someone’s gone.
My Google reader is always maxed out, I often hit READ and start over (bad blogger); on Twitter save for a handful of friends, I’m more likely to notice when someone reappears than when they disappear from my stream. My point is you have possibly hundreds of followers and subscribers who’ve either left themselves, or didn’t notice your posting changes.
I don’t spend enough time on my own analytics, know I need to find better numbers. You’re right about a lot of the “data” being useless. It’s lies, damn lies and statistics, without context or qualitative measures. FWIW.
I’m with you 100% on marking all unread blog posts read in my feed reader, when they just add up and I get overwhelmed.
…which is why I progressively either unsubscribe from blogs (relying on Twitter, CommentLuv, etc to find new places that inspire), and/or use different categories (such as a “weekly” category where things pile up).
Great post. I completely agree, I think that too often we are drawn to the “big” numbers…how many fans, followers or community members. Similar to simply looking at revenue figures rather than margins or other financial ratios. Until we put some finance style ratios into measurements of social media we will not have a good sense of our success.
My thoughts on bringing financial ratios for Online Communities- http://bit.ly/bQ83yG
I am not a huge fan of numbers, but I have always waxed and waned based on sentiment. What a great way to strengthen the argument using hardcore charts, graphs, and PROOF!
Good on ya, Mack. You rock 🙂
Very interesting!
I know everyone wants the numbers and this makes some people lose sight of the main component of social media. Relations, people who do social media right may have a few hundred followers that do listen and are engaged and that counts more than a big crowd of followers who don’t listen. Maybe, Susie who is a loyal follower of Tom doesn’t need his product or info at the time but she knows her sister does, so she passes the info along and many times this type of word of mouth marketing is almost unmeasurable 😉
To add a whammy to your assumptions, I just clicked over here after reading your post in your RSS feed — which I read for the first time today, despite your publishing this nearly a week ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if others click from the feed on a less frequent basis. Some folks comment on 3-5 blog posts of mine at a sitting.
Ari, Good whammy. I’ve done the read/comment in a group like that when taking the time to catch up on someone’s blog. I also get to posts via subscriptions to comments, related posts. Or seeing your CommentLuv link, leads me to your latest post. Thanks.