Most companies who aren’t still running their business on a PDP-11 have figured out that they need to be present in social media if they want to have a more personal and meaningful relationship with customers. However, most have been looking at the wrong statistics.
The number of followers you have on Twitter doesn’t really matter. In a sense, it never did—but now that lists are being used by increasing numbers of members, it means that people are more prone to politely follow-back to people who they intend to mostly ignore; the list feature allows them to organize the people they are truly interested in.
What matters is your engagement with the people you communicate with, and how much you influence them. One measure of influence is the ability to see how frequently they retweet your content, reply to you, or share links to the content you post. Tweetmeme.com is a good tool for seeing how frequently your links are shared (even when people drop your @ name from the link). Tools like Klout are getting closer to measuring actual social influence by looking at statistics to retweet velocity, replies and senders to get at the “true reach” of your social media program.
However, I think Klout’s statistics are far from the real purpose of social media (although I suspect they are probably heading in that direction). The point isn’t about how many eyeballs we “reach” (which is an old advertising term), it’s about who we’re engaging with, and how influential those people are. For many brands on Twitter, you could probably make a list of 20 people who you’d like to influence, and you’d be quite happy if you were sure you were only directly influencing them! The real purpose of social media is to reinforce your brand qualities and to have impact.
Back to lists: I suspect there’s a lot more intelligence to be gained from the lists that people appear on—and how these lists are organized, the frequency of replies and retweets within lists, etc. This data could be a goldmine for the right aspiring entrepreneur!
