Why are people investing in Social Media Advertising blindly?

Remember at the beginning of Internet Advertising, when we were buying tons of CPM banners and never knew where our money went? Then the CPC came, and said it was better. At last Performance arrived, and we could finally really know our ROI.

Well, when talking about Instagram and Social Media in general, we are back to the stone age – marketing speaking. Companies and Marketing Managers are paying Social Media Stars basing their fees on the number of followers (the CPM of Social Networks) without having a real metric able to measure the engagement of the stars’ audience. Yes, you can monitor your organic traffic growth. Yes, you can check if you got any more sales. But can you do anything before running the campaign?

Through daily monitoring most of the Instagram accounts out there, at Popular Chips we created advanced metrics like FPL and FPC (how many followers are required to generate a like or a Comment) and two quality scores, by which we rank Instagram influencers.

The Overall Score (or Absolute Score) indicates how wide the audience of the stars is and the level of this audience’s engagement. This means that we are looking at a combination of how many followers they have, how many comments and likes they receive. There is no surprise that the top positions of this ranking are real-life celebrities like Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift and Kendall Jenner.

The Relative Score indicates how strong the bond between social influencers and their audience is, independently of the audience’s size. This gives you an idea of the audience’s quality. In this case, minor celebrities run the show; as we could expect, bigger celebrities have weaker bonds with their audience than smaller influencers.

Have a look for example at the top Instagram stars: http://popularchips.com/top-instagram-influencers

Kinda different from just thinking about followers, right?

What you think? Useful or not?