What Do You Measure in Social Media?

“What gets measured gets corrected!”

Back in the day when Six Sigma was all the rage and I hung around with its adherents, I heard that expression a lot.

I mean really a lot!

Now, while I thought that many times the whole Six Sigma fad was a bot overdone, there were some gems that I took away.

“What gets measured gets corrected!” was one of them.

Often times in social media, we forget to measure.

Or, we measure the wrong things.

One of my favorite topics, time, when talking about metrics is often overlooked.

This leads to the frustration and disappointment with social media that many organizations, especially small and medium sized businesses, feel.

Large organizations have different needs and tools available, not to mention better funding, available when thinking about social media metrics.

Small and medium sized businesses don’t have to start on that scale or ever even reach it.

Sometimes, even Google Analytics can be overkill for them initially.

Keeping things simple, particularly at the start, is a great idea for small and medium sized businesses when starting with social media metrics.

Excel will often take care of basic needs involving social media metrics long before a more involved solution is required.

Let’s talk about something I just mentioned, namely time.

(Don’t worry this won’t become a physics lesson!)

Time is a continuum.

There’s yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

What did we look like yesterday compared to today and where do we want to go tomorrow?

Thinking about this helps us with our social media program.

It helps us to understand the processes we need to put into place.

It helps us to answer some key questions.

What data do we need in order to know if we’re accomplishing our goals?

How will we collect this data and where will be put it?  (Hint, we need a better answer than a thumb drive.)

What actions will we take once we have this data and have analyzed it?

Get the picture?

(That’s not one of the key questions!)

The goal here is to have a data driven social media program.

We need to get down to the lowest possible, actionable task and measure it.  (Another hint, saying we want to increase revenues is not a good enough goal by itself.)

Once we measure something then we can start doing something about it!

That’s it for now!

In the meantime, thank you for following and reading my blog!

I look forward to any and all comments that you may have.  I will reply to any comments made to this blog post as promptly as I can.

Remember!

I do this for a living and if I can be of any assistance to either you or your organization, please feel free to call on me.  Our initial discussion will be of no charge to you.

I can also be reached at conpsweeney@someddi.com.

My Twitter handle is @conpsweeney.

Stay well!