Social Media Metrics For Dummies

Reaching a State of Acceptance

As you get into the habit and practice of studying data, you’ll begin to not only reach a state of acceptance, but one of happiness. You’ll finally feel that your efforts online for yourself and your brand aren’t being wasted. That feeling of spinning your wheels or losing control of your time will disappear. Your fear of numbers and spreadsheets will go away as you see how useful the information you’re tracking is to your bottom line.

One thing you can do to reach that state of acceptance faster is solidify metrics as part of your daily, weekly, and monthly routine. Spend time each week, especially, studying the data you have gathered and thinking of new ways to put it to work for you (see Figure 5-5).

Play around with spreadsheets, even if you don’t think you’re good at them yet. Practice moving your data around and study how using different sets of criteria and different ways of seeing the information can give you a fully different picture. You may walk away with two solutions to a tricky problem instead of one just by learning how to adjust the data inside your spreadsheet to answer different questions.

Figure 5-5: Sample data report.

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