Social marketing is now a key part of search marketing and should be included in any digital marketing plans. But how do you know how effective it is?
The Google Penguin update was designed to remove deliberate link building for no purpose than increasing numbers of inbound links. Companies providing these unhelpful services have now switched to providing social marketing services – such as increasing numbers of followers or likes on a page. But this is another pointless task as these fake or useless followers can be picked up.
The service Fake Follower Check is a quick check on roughly how many of your Twitter followers are fakes. If you employ a social media agency to manage your social media it is worth checking the quality of followers obtained. Available from www.twitteraudit.com/ or fakers.statuspeople.com/ once logged in to your Twitter account you can check the quality of the followers. This is done by assigning percentages to the Fake, Inactive or Good followers.
Fakers.statuspeople.com analyses a sample of followers and looks for signs of spam activity – those accounts with few followers and few tweets yet following a high number of accounts.
On fakers.statuspeople.com you should expect near zero fake followers. Any value over 2% indicates a poorly managed account. The majority of followers should be in the Good category – and these will be the ones adding value. The inactive ones will not (currently) penalise your account, but they offer little benefit.
Savy marketing managers will ensure any outsourced social media management is aiming to increase Good followers and keep a near zero number of fake followers.
So what percentage of your followers are fake?
- Zero fake followers – well done. You or your social media agency are doing a good job.
- 2-5% fake followers – watch carefully as the social media management may not be as careful as it could be.
- Over 5% - you have as serious issue with how your social media account is managed. Effort is being wasted achieving fake followers that might actually harm your reputation.
TwitterAudit is more conservative, using a larger sample of followers and calculating scores based on number of tweets, date of last tweet and ratio of followers to friends. This publishes an audit score and you should be aiming for well over 80%.
So to ensure your social marketing is doing well, ensure you check the right measurements. These are not just numbers of followers, but quality of followers.
ExtraDigital provide effective social marketing management services to a variety of clients, aiming to increase the numbers of good followers, providing mareting benefit to clients.
