A New Way To Look At A Social Network's Success

In any business, there are a variety of ways to quantify success. Different methods are used to streamline businesses in different ways. For example, in marketing the approach is to increase exposure, then awareness, then interest, convert that to a purchase, and have that lead to a recommendation. It is ONLY when the interest is converted to a purchase that a marketing method is considered a "success."

Not surprisingly, social media is coming up with a way of its own to measure success. According to this article on Mashable.com, social networks have started to figure out a "funnel" of their own to measure success.

According to the article, the, "'conversion rate' refers to the total number of visitors who came to a site, compared to the number of visitors who did a desired action (such as creating an account or purchasing an item)."


As we discussed in our Web Technologies class, it is fundamental to a website's success to see at what point a user stops "going down the funnel," and figuring out why. Adjusting to the changes that the user demands is what will improve a website and make it more suitable to it's user's needs.

Later in the article, the writer explains that the importance of the actions of the users, as opposed to the number of pageviews, has become increasingly relevant to a website. On the Internet today, and especially on social networks, the data collected about users and their activity is more important than anything.


Finally, the amount of returning visitors is discussed. The writer makes a good point when he discusses the fact that it isn't really a "community" if everyone is a newcomer. As such, he explains that "What we’re really measuring is the percentage of people who come back again and again. The most common way of approaching this is to look at a group of users from a single time period (a week, for example) and track their behavior over time."

The writer then discusses the fact that Twitter has a very low retention rate, which does not bode well for its future. This surprises me, as Twitter seems to be a site that almost seems like an addiction to a lot of users. If it's so addicting, why are retention rates so low?

I am intrigued at the fact that social media has become so established and so prominent that such in-depth analysis has been done. Online communities have literally revolutionized the world of business in a way that nobody could have anticipated 5 or 6 years ago.

As a young, entrepreneur type who happens to have a serious interest in this field, to say that I am "excited" about this industry would be like saying Kobe and Lebron are "good" at basketball.