For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been assisting a team with analyzing chatter, sentiment, and influence across some key social networks. All of these countless hours of data reminded me of a key nugget that I thought was necessary to pass along:

In social media, advocates count, fans don’t.

Too many of us get caught up in measuring the wrong pieces of data, and followers is a perfect example of this. How many marketing chats have you been to where you hear someone say, “Our Fan count is up by 300% this year,” or “I need to get another 500 fans by the end of the month.” If those are your marketing goals, you need some help (and not this kind of help).

What matters is what they’re saying, not their sheer presence. To give you an example (and take the easy way out), just look at Apple. Good luck if you attempt to find an actual branded social media page, but an equal amount of luck to you if you try to escape Apple chatter. Even more data of this can be found by looking through the case study work of Motivequest, where they have been able to isolate with a really high confidence level the correlation between online advocacy and sales (check out this SlideShare piece).

To sum up, take your fan and follower counts and throw them out the window. Focus on metrics that better position you to learn from and in turn activate word of mouth. (More on that later)