People (especially CEO’s it seems) love numbers. I suppose it’s a quick way for us to see who’s better, faster, stronger, etc. Unfortunately, the tangled web that is the world of social media on the internet has few hard and fast numbers and the numbers we do have are pretty much meaningless.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve given web stats to a client and they’ve looked at the unique visitors number and asked me, “Is that a good amount?” It all depends. Compared to Amazon.com, probably not, but we’re not competing with Amazon. I’m relieved that most of the people writing about web analytics now admit that the page view & unique visitors numbers are meaningless on their own.

Here are a couple of other numbers you can safely ignore: Twitter Followers and Google Page Rank.

Twitter Followers

Twitter is the new, bright shiny object. Seems like everyone is on it and one of the numbers easily available for all to see is number of followers. Seems like more = better, right? Not really. What are you trying to do on Twitter? Are you trying to influence millions (perhaps start a new religion)? Then more followers is better. Are you doing research into who’s talking about your product? Then who cares who follows you. Are you trying to become an authoritative voice in your field (usually social media)? You need followers. Are you giving your company a presence where you can make announcements? Well, it might be nice if someone is listening, but Twitter is searchable, so those announcements will become part of the web.

PageRank

This one’s a little more obscure, but you’ll see it thrown around when talking about SEO. I’ve always been a big suspicious of it, but that may be because I tend to work with smaller websites. We rarely even show up on PageRank. What is it, you ask? It’s a way to measure a page’s popularity and authority on the web. A number created by Google that may reflect whether one site ranks higher on a search result than another site. Note that I said ‘may,’ as with everything with Google search algorithms, we’re all guessing here.

There is one time when  PageRank does matter: if you’re selling links from your site to others or getting links from other sites. The ‘juice’ those links have is probably affected by the site’s PageRank.

Other than that, it’s much more important to actually look at where your site ranks for your targeted keywords (as many  SEO experts have said and keep saying).

Oh, and by the way, it’s not called PageRank because it ranks pages, but because it’s named after Larry Page, at least according to the Wikipedia entry on PageRank.