During our last Social Blade Show JD Rucker, Erin Ryan, and I were discussing Vitrue’s Social Page Evaluator and whether or not measurement tools such as the Page Evaluator should be held as legitimate. Legitimate in the sense of measuring your social media’s monetary value.
Following our conversation, I was browsing through TED and stumbled upon a great lecture given by Patricia Burchat on the topic of dark matter (don’t worry I’ll make the correlation). She explains around 4 percent of the total universe is made up of ordinary matter (i.e. you, me, planets, and galaxies). Meaning everything you and I can see, feel, and touch isn’t even the majority of our universe. Surprisingly, more than a quarter of our universe is made up of what’s dubbed as dark matter. Dark matter is the invisible matter in our universe that doesn’t react to our normal ways of measurement. But as Patricia explains, we know dark matter is present because of the gravitational effects it has on ordinary matter.
Just as cosmologists are limited to measuring our universe we ourselves are limited in our ability to measure social media. Tools like The Social Page Evaluator are only capable of measuring ordinary impressions (page views, number of posts, number of followers, etc). What they fail to take into account are the invisible gravitational effects of influence. Influence it seems is the dark matter of the social media universe. We know it’s there because we witness the dominance it has over ordinary impressions but still goes undetected by our measuring techniques.
Here’s an illustration: Company X has a Facebook page with one follower. Company Y also has a Facebook page with one follower. According to the measurement tools currently available to us, their Facebook page’s would be equally valued because their ordinary impressions were seen as equal. But because influence wasn’t present in the calculation it went unnoticed Company X’s single follower was someone of high influence while Company Y’s single follower was of low influence. Therefore, if we were to take into account their levels of influence Company X’s Facebook page would have a much higher value than Company Y’s.
Here’s the problem I have with measurement tools. While they’re able to measure ordinary impressions they fail in their ability to take into account the dark matter of our industry, influence. Can we accept tools such as the Social Page Evaluator as a legitimate means of measuring social media success if it only takes into account 4 percent of the social media universe?
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