Can social media success be measured?

Offline meetings are a great goal

For most bloggers, tweeters and Facebookers there is no real end to online. The online simply goes on and on and on and on, online. Some would offer their opinion, a theoretical enhancement of an unmetered status, of how to “correct” the issue. Perhaps there is no issue. However, in a summary inspection it is simple to tell if social media is helping one achieve their goals. That said there is not only one test and the definition of “success” is the big variable.

Most importantly one must have a goal even if that goal is dynamic and progressive. Goals for online activity may include getting people to “like” posts, having tweets “retweeted” and inspiring comments on a blog post. These may, indeed, be the end goal. For sites generating revenue on a traffic basis this may even make economic sense. Even if the goal is not an economic value one may still set this as a goal. It is not incumbent on the world to neither determine nor validate private goals.

Notable goals from a more economic than societal perspective may include realizing a set range of transactional engagements such as orders placed or subscriptions made. Although these goals may seem to make more sense economically the real value is primarily essential and most notable to the entity creating and managing or benefiting from the content and activities. As earlier indicated having “hits” is a goal regardless of whether or not that goal is socially acceptable as a true achievement.

Quite literally there are thousands of tools for measuring online activity. Knowing how many unique visits, the source of the visits (referring URL), the bounce rate, what time of day, is all elementary to virtually every site today. The real variable which provides the ultimate metric is: what is the true goal. Only the entity (company, organization, person) needing the answer to “can social media success be measured” can truly determine the real goal. Once the goal is identified then any statistician can create a formula for measuring success.

This, then, is the challenge to the aspiring social media success story to identify and define the goals in a format which is easy to communicate and easy to measure:

• I want more friends on Facebook (define more)
• I want 300 more friends on Facebook (define the time period)
• I want 300 more friends on Facebook within 90 days

Now that the goal is known, easily communicated and easily measure the real work begins.  Find out when the next totally free, no obligation, 100% usable information webinar or local event is available. Click here.