What is worse than a meaningless Social Media metric?

The answer is, meaningless social media metric presented in the form of a infographic. And it comes to us via MediaBistro from, not Social Media Gurus, no not witch doctors, and if you guessed Social Media Scientist that would be a good guess  but not correct, because it comes from SocialBakers.

If you have not figured out the flaw in the metric (shown left) or you are one of those 311 people who tweeted the link, I will try to point out the problems with bakers’ recipe.

The bakers give us a simplistic formula for what they arbitrarily define as Average Engagement Rate. This is not a model derived based on theory, data collection and experimentation but simply a formula thrown together with a mix of arithmetic operations. Disregard for a minute how it is computed (which is beyond ridiculous) and ask the following questions:

1. What does this really mean in the context of your marketing spend?
2. Why is this important?
3. What is the marginal benefit from a change in this metric?
4. More broadly, what does the curve look like ( Revenue = f(Average Engagement Rate))
5. What is the cost of moving the AER, if at all one could?
6. Are the AERs of Facebook, twitter etc additive?

Well keep asking as you are not going to find any such answers from the eye candy infographic.

Now to the computation.

First the units of this metric. It is stated as a percentage. And percentages are? Dimension less. The numerator at best is a dimensionless ratio and at worse has a complicated unit of Interaction/Activity. The denominator has units of number of people – fans, followers etc.  In other words the ratio is not a dimensionless quantity because you are dividing  a quantity that is NOT number of people by a quantity that is number of people. So how can anyone simply multiply this number by 100 to state this as a percentage? Like Baker’s Dozen, they should call this Baker’s percentage.

Second the ratio is specifically designed to show as low a value as possible and hence the possibility for improvement and potential sales. The numerator is divided by total number of followers (or fans) a brand has. So larger the number of followers, smaller the magical AER. The thermometer in the infographic tells us the maximum any brand currently has is 0.7%. This also explains why they chose to multiply by 100 and call it a percentage. Otherwise, 0.007 would look too awful for anyone to pay attention.

Third, this is indeed genius move in targeting, after all those brands with millions of followers likely have higher marketing spend and hence are likely to divert some of it to improve their measly AER.

There you have it, yet another pointless and wrong Social Media engagement metric, presented as a stunning infographic that not surprisingly found many takers.

Final note, if you are tempted by any of the social media engagement metrics that talk about anything except dollar values you can cure that temptation by reading Ron Shevlin‘s book Snarketing 2.0.