The little things - Sebastien Tremblay » follower http://stremblay.net Sun, 03 Jul 2011 15:45:35 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4-alpha-19827 About those numbers http://stremblay.net/web/about-those-numbers/ http://stremblay.net/web/about-those-numbers/#comments Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:00:13 +0000 Sebastien Tremblay http://stremblay.net/?p=77 I remember the first time I hit a “100″ on a social network. I really felt important. It was on Facebook and I could finally celebrate my 100th friend. For most people, numbers are an indicator of how popular they are. This has always been true. They compare their salary, the size of their house and (why not) the number of kids they have. It seems that having a big house means you are more successful. But does it really work that way ? Appearances are deceptive. This big house you admire belongs to the bank. And, unsurprisingly, will never really be paid.

So what about social networks ? Does having 4 500 friends on Facebook really make you an important facebooker ? No, it’s just numbers. It does not mean that you know all those friends. It does not even mean that you have any kind of interaction with these people. It’s just a number. What really matter is how many of your friends are commenting on your wall and how many are coming to your birthday. That is what you should count. How many of your Twitter followers really care about you ? Just consider how many replied to your last tweet or retweeted it. Social analytics are not about numbers, they are about interactions.

Next time you lose a friend on Facebook or a follower on Twitter, ask yourself this question : what is the impact ? Is it one less attendee for my next party ? One less reply ? Or just a number going down ? How many friends do you really have on social networks ?

]]> http://stremblay.net/web/about-those-numbers/feed/ 0