Social Media Metrics For Dummies

Dealing with Anger

As you begin to measure everything, you may begin to experience frustration with the data you find. You’ll notice that sites with less useful information (or, in some cases, completely wrong information) get better site traffic than you.

You’ll see that some folks openly “borrow” the ideas and memes others start and build success on the backs of their competitors’ hard work. It can make you want to throw in the towel, but don’t! Because you are measuring everything, this kind of competitive intelligence simply gives you the edge you need to improve and cultivate a better class of visitor to your site, blog, or social media profiles. Better visitor quality means better conversion rates. Better data means better content and design, which lead to better visitor quality.

Treat social media metrics and web data with the same number-crunching attitude you would statistics or algebra. Sort your data well as it comes in. Utilize spreadsheets and database files where you can to keep ongoing records of data you can categorize and compare against a variety of criteria over time.

So, what should get your dander up? Bad, shallow, or useless social media metrics. What’s a bad social media metric, you ask? Any metric that only looks at one piece of data or that doesn’t openly disclose its criteria for measurement. For example, at the time of writing, Klout is the media darling ...