Guest Blog Today by Steve Olenski.

Steve currently contributes to Forbes, Ad Age, Social Media Today, Marketing Profs, and many more while in search of his next full-time opportunity. We are a fan of his social media marketing content and wanted to give him the spotlight today.

As anyone who knows me or has been around me for more than thirty seconds knows, I am somewhat of a pop culture savant. I love to combine my knowledge of inane, otherwise useless information with my knowledge of social media and marketing and advertising.

Exhibit A can be found in an article I wrote last year for Marketing Profs titled: “Baby, We Were Born to Market: Springsteen on Social Media Marketing,” in which I used lyrics from Springsteen songs and applied them to social media marketing.

Today I want to quote another fine American, Foghorn Leghorn.

Yes, that Foghorn Leghorn.  For after reading the results of a survey conducted by Awareness called the “State Of Social Media Marketing” the first thing that came to mind upon seeing one finding in particular was Mr. Leghorn’s classic lament., “No, no, no! You’re doin’ it all wrong!”

This is the finding in question:

It was quite disheartening to say the least to see over 75% of the respondents still worried about size.

This is not about buying a house… SIZE DOESN’T MATTER!

Sure, it would look great and would surely pump up your social media marketing ego to be able to tout that your client has 50,000 followers on Twitter, and their Facebook page has 120,000 Likes. But instead of rolling out useless numbers as you wait for your cup of coffee to finish brewing in the company break room, why not roll out how many leads and sales your efforts have led to?

And absolutely why not puff your chest out and tell the world how much traffic to the client’s website your efforts have resulted in?  At least 67% of the responders identified that as being an important metric to measure and brag about, presumably.

But likes and followers?  As my 7-year old son would say, “Really?”

We’re not talking about the early days of social media where it was ALL about the size; it was ALL about who had the most followers, fans, likes and on and on and on.

Nowadays with the practice of buying followers and likes so prevalent, how can anyone put any stock in numbers?

To me, my goal would be to drive as many people to a website as possible who in turn become viable leads and hopefully sales.

Of course there is one caveat to all of this.  One minor little detail every social media marketing and company, brand and business should know.

And that is if your product, your service, your ware sucks… social media won’t do a damn thing to help your bottom line.

Okay, so let me know what you think…

What are you, as a social media marketer, focused on when it comes to metrics?

How are you helping your clients or even your own company via social media?

Sources: Awareness Networks