Albert Qian: The Social Media Dude

Great Expectations: The Number of Fans

Market strategizing is no new field, but has in fact been around for quite awhile. Like graphic design, web development and engineering consulting, we’re paid to help companies bring their brands up to speed with current digital trends, design a platform or strategy and provide analytics services as needed.

As someone who’s been on both the client and consulting side, I understand how things are tough when it comes to the client-consultant relationship. Consultants have every intention of helping, and clients have every desire to receive any help possible, but often times both come up with a bevy of unrealistic expectations. 

One request that I’ve received in my consulting life is that of the number of fans. A client will invariably ask me, “Can you increase our count of followers to [insert some number here]?” and then proceed to layer incentives into the process. As a client, I would understand that there is reasoning in this argument. You want the consultant to do well, and you want to increase your following to increase visibility, and possibly see your page go viral. All are neat and absolutely wonderful things, but there are a few key reasons why this simply does not make a shred of sense:

1. Social media operates like any other product out there on the market - the market will determine whether your product is worth the experience or not. As a consultant I am here to help cultivate a brand, not grow the fan count.
2. Fan count numbers are therefore a moot point for the most part, and while numbers are important, do not matter in the medium to long term.
3. What ought to matter more is the feedback you get from fans that you garner off of analytics reports. What percentage of your fans visited you this week? Interacted with you? Left a comment? This stuff matters more because your brand is engaging to the audience.

I’m not trying to be a party crasher with a critique of fan counts - reaching 1,000 or 10,000 or even 100,000 is a legitimate milestone to be celebrated and a definitive result of how successful your push to become visible is, but its equally as important to know how many of your thousands of fans are liking the Facebook Page or following the Twitter feed and shouting back at you and making an effort to respond.

How about you? When it comes to the number of fans, what matters?