The dangerous trap of vanity metrics!

You maybe the next big scape goat.

Welcome to the 2nd Issue of The Funnel Chemistry!

I am happy that you are here and I am committed to give value for the time you are taking out to read and share the contents of this Newsletter.

This post has 1120+ words and would take 4.5 Minutes of your time! Without much ado, let’s see deep dive into the concept of today!

The Vanity Metrics Trap

Everyone and their dog wants (a) Followers (b) Likes (c) Views/Impressions on social media. Many brag about it. Think about LinkedIn posts that go:

I had 1Million content impressions in the last six months and my followers grew to 25,000 mark.

An explanation of how they got there follows!

Nothing wrong with all that! It is definitely an accomplishment. But, what they never say or mention is what they do with all that attention.

You are a victim of the Vanity Metrics Trap, if you yearn for social media attention, (measured through view, likes, comments, reach, etc.) without having a clear cut idea about what you are going to do with it!

And let me warn you, for those who have fallen prey to this trap, Social Media has just become dangerous!

Attention is a very valuable commodity on the Internet. There are millions who don't get any! You are definitely lucky if you have got it. But, how much attention you got will not matter if you don't have a plan to use that towards some end.

Social Media Platforms throw a ton of data at you! Page Views, Page Likes, Followers, Content Impressions, Post Likes, Post Reach and many more.

All these become Vanity Metrics if you don't know how to take the attention you generated to the next level.

Let me share my personal experience.

My Personal Experience

My training business was predominantly offline till March 2020. When the first lockdown was announced, Me and my late partner Dr. V.S. Manjunath, decided that we should go digital. We subscribed to zoom, explored the different features, set up the back end processes needed to manage the online training and got going.

One of the strategies we had thought of was to have free online webinars to attract people. We assembled a set of resource persons to talk on a variety of subjects. We started announcing our free webinars on social media, WhatsApp groups and other forums where we thought we would get audience.

Our strategy worked. We used to get about 70 to 80 people for each of our free webinars. We tried live streaming some of these on Facebook. So, did our likes, followers and impressions increase? Not really. Our Facebook page still has less than 1000 followers and our post reach is dismal.

But what increased was our enrollments into training programs. We started seeing the same people who were on our free webinars sign up into our training programs!

Typically, a candidate would try our most economical program and then come to one more and then to another and so on. They loved our material, our approach, our passionate presentation and our simplification process. They couldn't stop recommending our training to friends.

So, for me, as an entrepreneur, what mattered was enrollments. The only metric I used to track was the ratio of number of participants in our webinars to the number of people who enrolled into our training programs!

That was the only number that made sense to me, back then! We had generated a lot of attention and we had our own ways of converting that attention into business.

How to use this knowledge!

If you want to avoid the Vanity Metrics Trap, then ask the following questions:

(A) What is the degree of attention you command on social media?

This is very well documented using the many metrics given to you by social media platforms! Look at your average content impressions or reach. Look at the number of followers you have. All this will tell you how much attention you command

(B) What is the business metric you want to connect with the degree of attention?

I connected my webinar participation to enrollments in my training programs. You can connect your average post reach to number of people who purchased your product/service. Remember this. If you don't tie your social media metrics to some or the other business metric then you are the most likely victim of the Vanity Metrics Trap! Some useful business metrics to connect could be:

• Number of inquiries through DM/Email/Phone

• Number of hits on a specific page of your website

• Number of referrals that your customers are giving you

(C) If you have more attention on social media will your business metric expand?

For example, I asked, if I increased the number of webinars will my enrollments raise. We tried by doubling our free webinars per week. But we saw that the enrollments did not really move even after a couple of weeks. So, we rolled back as doing more was not expanding the business metric.

Next Steps

Take some time off from your busy content creation work. Ask yourself if you have been chasing social media attention without knowing how to make use of it. Like I suggested, tie up social media metric with a business metric and begin tracking it!

Did you like this Newsletter? Did you get some value out of this? Please share this with someone who you think will enjoy this!

If you haven't already subscribed to the newsletter, here's your chance to do it now!

Book of the week

This week I have been reading three books in parallel, but am going to talk about the one that I am just about to finish. Dearly by Margaret Atwood is a wonderful collection of metaphorically rich poetry.

The first ever book I read by Margaret Atwood was The Blind Assassin. It had won the Man Booker Prize in 2000 and I was yearning to to read it. My girlfriend (now my wife!) gifted it to me. I plunged into it to be swept off my feet by a crazily complicated plot. Three stories nested and intertwined with one another with a brilliant and spotless narrative. So, when I was browsing Goodreads for new books on poetry and saw Dearly by Atwood, I plucked it.

Atwood is nearly 80 years old now! Her poetry is superbly crafted if not more meticulously written than her prose. She is a master of the metaphor and she deploys that in her poetic world amply.

When you read, you wonder about the new breed of female Werewolves! What if you encounter one? Will our children ever know the plastic free world which our generation lived in? And there is a lot of mourning! The death of the baby whale floating on his mother's back because of the plastic in the ocean! The justification we give for the plastic usage! The birth of the new age robot which would take away the humanity in the humans!

It's a treat for those who love a shade of darkness in what they read! Highly recommended for a short read that would dip you in death and refresh your desolation!

You can purchase the book from amazon, here.

Those are the words for this week, folks!

Thank You
Namaste