Social Media Rankings

Social media marketing has a direct effect on search engine rankings and engines are using social voting systems and bookmarking trends to determine quality sites. So, can you use search engine rankings to determine the popularity of the company in a certain industry?

As more people are getting on Social Media, many companies too are not missing the boat. I often get thess questions: "How to I determine the success of Social Media of a company?" or "How do I determine the Social Media Ranking of companies?"

I came across this article which does not answer the above questions, but it is an interesting read.
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There is no doubt that when you engage the public, and as you gain more influence, there will be more blogs and forums talking about your products and services. But how does anyone determine whether you are more successful in Social Media than someone else?

In my opinion, there are very simple rules to follow on how successful a company or someone is, on Social Media.

1) Number of Fans/Followers/Subscribers - This is a very basic information. The more the number is, the more people you can reach. As with the rankings and ratings, this is a numbers game. Whether this truely reflects the quality of the crowd, you need other ways to determine.

2) Number of Comments/Feedback - This reflects on how many people actually liked the post so much that they have to give feedback. The more influential the company, the more the comments there will be. This is often correlated with number of followers and subscribers, but I have seen cases where the audience is so targeted that several hundred fans give more comments than another company with several thousand fans.

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I often ask myself, why bother with the numbers game. I guess the reasons I can think of are often, "Ego" and "Justification". Many companies who go into Social Media often like to think that they are doing well by searching rankings and ratings online to please their "Egos" and to justify the time and effort spent.

I strongly feel that the effects of Social Media efforts are very long termed strategies. The information on the Internet will be there for years to come, and if the information is of value, people will appreciate it and companies can treat it as a form of Corporate Social Responsibility, a good way for them to give back to the public and the industry. Good Social Media Strategies provide value and long term sustainability, and eventually, this will help branding of the company more than any short term rankings will.

-- Robin Low