How many followers do you have? How many do you reckon will be enough before one is termed social or 'influential'.

This article focuses on vanity metrics that community managers have to be wary of. If you are a newbie to community management, then this article was created with you in mind!

Vanity metrics

These are considered to be social media measurements that do not translate into important KPIs. Key Performance Indexes are tools used to measure how well a content fared on the social media space. Some examples are

• Comments
• Shares
• Saves
• Retweets

These KPIs show you how your followers actively engage with any content you put out there. Remember that you are in a constant war for the battle of their attention. Therefore, vanity metrics such as likes, do not count.

How to create content to make the actual numbers count? The do the following:

Create a Customer Persona

You need to create an ideal customer and craft your words as though you were speaking to just that person; this makes your content to be more relatable. Readers can also immerse themselves in whatever scenario you paint and see how best the solutions you have created for the works.

Address Pain Points: So, through your research done in creating customer personas, you will discover that your ideal customer has problems-they desire solutions to them. Your content should center on solving these problems and see as engagement would begin to increase. These pain points present an opportunity for dialogue and communication between them and you.

Study Analytics

It's okay to try some new things once in a while. To be certain that what you're iterating is effective, you need to study the analytics for the social media platform you made that piece of content. The analytics that are to be measured have been listed above.

Conclusion

There are other important metrics to look out for to measure the growth of an online community that I may not have mentioned. Do let me know them in the comment section. Till next time!