Mrs. Sattler’s Rules on Measuring

I was taught about it in the third grade in Mrs. Sattler’s class. She pulled out a big clear tub of multi colored rulers and started to talk about measuring distance. Throughout the year I remember learning about different ways to measure distance. Sometimes you needed a one-foot ruler; other times a yardstick, sometimes an odometer to measure really long distances. Mrs. Sattler explained we needed to know what we were measuring and pick the best tool to do it. We wouldn’t measure a mile using a one-foot ruler, and we wouldn’t use an odometer to measure two steps. We learned measuring requires knowledge of what exactly is being measured as well as what tool is best to measure with.  

Measuring anything seems quizzical until you realize that measuring is the only way to tell you how far you have come and how much farther you have to go. I believe that this is the same with social media.

The biggest concern with anybody looking at social media is that at first it can seem chaotic, and hard to track. It would seem that with over a billion people on Facebook and over 300 million on Twitter that to get any measurable results you would have to hire legions of data crunchers. This is all true to a degree, however, there is good news! Many social media platforms have ways to measure and see results from social media efforts in real time. Some look with a macro view others look at individual, seemingly obscure data points that develop into a rich bank of information.

As Mrs. Sattler said, you must know what you are measuring then pair it up with the correct tool, not the other way around. There are a many tools available to measure and track results in real time. Some of them you have to pay for, some free, some simplistic, some incredibly dense.

I personally like getting a look behind the scenes just to see how social media is performing and seeing what can be done to make it better. Mrs. Sattler might take this as a measure of how much I love social media and I would have to agree.

 

This post was written by Chandler Elmore. Chandler is a Social Media Specialist with Media Connect Partners.