You’ve got your social media strategy and tactics in place. You’re measuring everything you can: tweets, retweets, followers, friends, shares, visits, bounce rate, etc. But what do all these numbers tell you about how successful your strategy and tactics are? What if you’re measuring the wrong things? What’s the impact to your social media strategy?
Too Many Numbers
While I’m typically in favor of having as many measurements as possible, they can get overwhelming if you don’t truly understand what each number is telling you. Without understanding each metric, the tendency is too reach for larger numbers. Larger numbers are often good, but they may lead you astray of your business goal if they point you in the wrong direction.
The Wrong Tactics
If you get caught up in the numbers game, you may use tactics which get you more visitors, more followers, and more of everything. But more isn’t always better. If your business goal is to increase sales leads, your tactics will not be the same as those used to increase followers. While increasing followers may lead to increased sales leads, you may be spending a lot of resources inefficiently if you’re measuring the wrong metrics.
The Wrong Results
When you measure the wrong metrics, you may implement the wrong tactics which lead to the wrong results. If you put a lot of weight on metrics like followers and visits, but they don’t tell you anything about whether or not you’re reaching your business goals, you may wonder why your social media strategy isn’t working. Start with your business goal and then figure out how social media can help you reach that goal. Then look for the right metrics to tell you whether or not you’re on the right path.
What do you think?
(image by Yashna M)