Is social media a kind of currency?

It's easy to consider a social media following as a kind of currency. Articles on well known news outlets are regularly published telling how Instagram users with a reasonable followings charge brands huge amounts to make one or two partnership posts. So logically a following == money.

But it isn't that simple. Translating follower numbers or view counts directly into a numerical value is a slippery slope, both for you and for the client.

What's seen is NOT what's real.

Currency has a numerical value that people understand and believe in. It's what makes numbers safe, at least in the short term.

• 1 + 1 = 2
• 2 + 2 = 4
• and so on ... 

But social media numbers: follower counts and view counts are NOT numbers that add up like that.

In order for people to rate follower numbers or views counts against each other they would need to have a common value.

The image below shows traffic sources for two different (but similar) YouTube videos.

Imagine that both videos have been viewed exactly 1 million times. 

The graph to the left shows that most traffic came from through YouTube browse features, and a quarter of the traffic came from embeds on external sites.

The graph to the right shows that 96.6% of the traffic was paid, where money has been spent to put the video in front of people.

Is the "value" of each view on those videos the same?

Essentially to viewers the answer would be yes. From the outside both videos did equally well. Both were watched 1 million times.

But the actual value of those views is entirely different. One had 1 million free views, commonly in the industry called "organic views", and the other video had 1 million paid views. There is clearly a very difference financial cost for the each video owner. So the number are NOT comparable.

The same goes for follower numbers.

Followers can be purchased. It is frowned upon in the industry as it cooks the books, but many "influencers" will have doped their follower count. Others may have had it doped for them for free, by being one of the lucky few users a network has chosen to "promote" or suggest that other users follow.

If you are an advertiser spending real money on "Influencer Marketing" you need to stop using view counts and follower numbers to balance your financial transactions. It doesn't work.

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