Why measuring your social a few minutes every week will make all the difference.

Many people starting out with a new Facebook page, Twitter Profile, Pinboard, Instagram Profile or < insert your social media addiction here> will know that building an engaging, active and interested community doesn’t come easy. In the paraphrased words of Peter Drucker, you can’t measure what you’re doing [on Social], you won’t know what you should or shouldn’t be doing if you’re not taking a look at the impact your tactics produce (a tactic being an activity to achieve a pre-defined goal, for example: the incorporation of trendy images or relevant memes that drive engagement, to achieve the goal of building an active and engaged community).

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. – Peter Drucker

Measuring success on Social Media can be a daunting task , filled with quantitative measures such as likes, comments, shares, mentions, retweets, pins, repins, Klout scores, and follower growth, as well as qualitative measures such as engagement sentiment and quality.

So what exactly does measuring your social media mean? This all depends on what you are aiming to achieve. All metrics are the results of tactics, planned or otherwise, which lead to the achievement of goals on social media.

If your goal is to increase community engagement and interaction, you need to measure follower interactions on a per-post level to identify which pieces of content perform best with your audience. By measuring, you can find the answer to simple questions, like “short posts or long posts?”  “Text posts or image posts?” “image posts with text, or without text?” If your goal is to develop brand exposure, you need to measure the sharability of your content by measuring shares on Facebook, retweets on Twitter, and Repins on Pinterest.

Platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube make understanding and exporting your numbers a breeze—stats can be exported seamlessly to Excel. While other platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Goodreads lack detailed analytics and make the process a little tougher to navigate through measurements.

To effortlessly keep track of metrics on a platform and post level, you will need to employ the use of social media analytics tools such as: HootSuite, Sprout Social, and Crowdbooster. These tools will allow you to keep record of your metrics, and in many cases allow for a central location to access your various platforms.

Is measuring and tying metrics to success not your strong suite? We’d love to help your achieve your goals in, and outside of social media. Let’s connect – give us a call at 800.627.1265, tweet @mediacpartners, or drop a line to info@mcpsocial.com

This post was written by Duncan Platt. Duncan is Engagement Manager with Media Connect Partners.