Updated-
- Have a starting point to know how well your plans are working
- Find where people are coming from to get to your site (blog, etc.)
- Learn what’s being said about you
- Find out where things are being said about you
- Find your potential customers
- Find your influencers
- Find competitors
- Figure out how you’re doing compared to competitors
- Learn what’s working in your strategy (and what’s not)
- Learn what to write about
- Learn how to improve your product (or service)
- Learn what time of day has better response
- Learn what types of posts are more likely to be shared
- Learn how you can help your customers
- Learn where to devote resources (time, money, etc)
- Learn what to change (marketing strategy, etc.) – from Tom Nixon
I’m sure there are other reasons, but that’s what I came up with off the top of my head. I intend this to be an ongoing list, so your help is appreciated: What other reasons are there why you should measure?
(photo by Memotions @ Flickr CC)
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Technorati tags: social media, public relations, brand, marketing, branding, social networking, business, reputation, customer service
A lot of business people may have trouble with the basic metrics for their websites: pageviews, visits, unique visits, etc. (hits usually get thrown around), but when you talk about how to measure social media success, they look a little scared. Social media (when used well) is a great tool for connecting directly to customers in a way that’s never been affordable for most of us. We can have conversations, we can get our ideas out there and we can see what people are saying about us. So how to measure all that?
Hits are really a reference for how many files are being downloaded from the web server. In the days when web pages only had one file associated with them, it made more sense to use hits as a measure of traffic on a website. These days one web page is made up of many different files. Each file downloaded is considered one hit. How many files (hits) per page can vary greatly. So it doesn’t make sense to use hits for measuring traffic any more (unless you want to know how much you’re using your web server).