It’s 9am: Do you know where your social media is?

Okay, you’ve been posting on Facebook and maybe even Twitter, maybe even blogging! Great! So…Do you really know how you’re doing?

If you don’t know how you’re doing, you shouldn’t be doing it.

This is one of my favourite phrases. It feeds right from “If you don’t know why you’re doing something, you shouldn’t be doing it.” Are your efforts succeeding? Should you change tack at all? It’s critical to answer these seemingly simple questions, but you have to know where to look.

Oh, the lovely free-ness of the internet

Go back to the beginning and look at your goals. What were you trying to achieve in the first place? They could be things like 2 interactions a week (to start), the sale of a house from a social media connection within the first 6 months, to grow your fans and followers to a certain level, or simply to be consistent in your efforts.

There are lots of free places where you can get insights into the degree to which your efforts are succeeding. Facebook has Insights that you can access right on your page (right hand side). You won’t have anything right off the bat, but give yourself some time (and some fans) and you’ll be able to see the type of people following you, how often they comment or like your page, etc. Then, for the posts that get you high engagement – do more. For the posts that just go by…well, do less. Bingo!

For Twitter, you can view your growth efforts on twittercounter.com. For an overall influence, check out how you rank on Klout.com. Be careful though: in my opinion, Klout.com is a bit of a popularity contest, so take the results with a grain of salt.

There’s always Google Analytics, which everyone with a web site should have. Check out how your traffic increases, where they go, and how long they stay.

Social Proof

Simply put, social proof is the number of people/fans/followers that line up behind you and say “yes, this person has value to me.” Here are the social proof indicators for the big three:

LinkedIn: The number of recommendations. You can ask anyone in your network to recommend you, and I highly recommend it (pardon the pun).

Facebook: Number of Fans. Yes, it’s a number, but a rather important one. Growing your fan base and increasing interactions with them is critical. Once you have that critical mass, the proof is in the pudding (i.e. the interactions, engagement, etc.).

Twitter: Number of people who have listed you. This means that people have “short listed” you. Many have hundreds or thousands of people they are following. To cut through the noise, they create lists to focus on people they really like to hear from.

Go out and measure!

Know how you’re doing, track it, and adjust. There is no silver bullet. There is no perfect solution. Everyone’s fan and follower base is unique, so it’s up to you to be the listener. Grow big ears – and then respond accordingly.

Do you use other measurement tools? I’d love to hear about them!

Rebecca

About author:

Rebecca has been in Marketing for over 12 years now. She has worked at all sorts of companies – large public ones, small private ones, medium sized firms and now she works for herself. She specializes in training companies to use social media intelligently, so they can use it to grow their business, get found in social and Google searches and integrate their online and offline marketing strategies. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook

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