For some people, social media is all about the numbers. Â How many followers you have on Twitter, how many friends you made on Facebook, etc. When you first get into this method of promotion, that’s what seems to be the best way to measure your success, but is it?
While having plenty of followers is definitely a good thing, it doesn’t mean you aren’t successful if you have just 900 people following you on Twitter. The real test is whether or not these are active friends, people who will either buy from you or promote you. If you have 100,000 followers and only 50 of them are really interested in your product, then you don’t really need the remaining 95,000 . . . it’s just more noise.
Does this mean you should get rid of everyone who isn’t actively retweeting or sharing your links? Not necessarily. But it does mean that you should reevaluate what you equate with success.
What is Social Media Success?
Each company will need to determine exactly what they consider to be success. Numbers of followers are rarely a good place to start. You can easily gain hundreds of “friends” simply by befriending everyone you come across on a social media site. So what should you be looking at? There are several ways to distinguish the your success:
- Traffic. Aim to bring in a certain amount of traffic with social media and then work on that. While this is still a numbers game, it is far more specific.
- Sales. An increase in sales as a direct result of your social networking efforts is a good way to judge how successful you are.
- Publicity. When other people start talking about you, on blogs, Twitter, and newsletters without you asking them to, you can use this as a measurement of success, as well.
Of course, each business will have their own methods of measuring success and you can come up with your own. What you hope to accomplish with social media is a goal that you and only you can set for yourself.
Once you know what you want and how you are going to know when you reach it, a plan is in order. Write down how you will reach your goal, step by step. This might be something simple, such as tweeting 3 times a day, or adding 3 new, related friends on LinkedIn each day, or holding a contest or giveaway each month. Multiple methods are often best for really getting your name out there. You’ll find that most popular social media users are active in a variety of ways across their chosen networks, often gaining plenty of publicity in the process.
While number can be significant, don’t get too hung up on them. Instead, look for more tangible methods of measuring your success with social media.
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This post continues to point at a quantifiable use for social media. What of the qualitative use of social media? What I’m getting at is while we can certainly now reach significantly more people and those with genuine interest in “what we are doing” often times all this really comes to is a giant social media echo chamber of RT’s, bitly & tinuURL’s.
Total disclaimer here… I’m a educator. I use social media in very different ways than to solely promote myself or what I’m doing. Though those are inherent in the use of social media, I find a much deeper value in using social tools and connections to learn and progress in what I do.
So what other ways are businesses using social media to benefit their business other than as PR and to increase sales? Is there a professional development angle any are taking? If not, why not? How does social media make your people better employees, professionals and learners?