Social Media Metrics For Dummies

Looking at How Individuals Use Metrics

If you’re an individual reading this book, then your social media use is going to be vastly more conversational in nature than the average corporation. This is a good thing! There is a solid case for the value of casual engagement. Casual engagement leads to offline referrals, casual word-of-mouth promotion, and the kind of organic, naturally occurring, connections that stem from getting to know someone. You can and will measure these things, but you should be doing it in the background, in order to keep your interactions genuine.

It’s still important to be authentic and very much yourself whether you’re talking about your personal voice or your brand voice.

Measuring organic relationships

Measuring a truly organic connection is always going to be a mostly manual process. For example, in my individual use of Twitter, I have made thousands of connections. Over the years, I’ve developed an understanding of people’s strengths and weaknesses and special talents. I’ve gotten to know them well through casual conversation, occasional real-life meetings, and shared projects.

As time has gone on, I’ve entered them into my customer relationship manager (CRM), which happens to be BatchBook, with a note about what I’ve discovered. It is not uncommon for me to make introductions between my connections when I see a fit or to send a job someone’s way because ...