Chapter 4

Measuring Everything

In This Chapter

Casting a wide net

Metrics for business growth

Metrics for sales

Identifying metrics sources

You may find yourself wondering what you should measure. I say measure everything and then sift through the data to get to the meat of the information. Social media changes so fast and has such a human element at its core that the only way to get results you can use is to absorb and track everything possible.

Measuring the seemingly fickle and unpredictable behavior of people online can seem like a chore at first, but it’s actually quite interesting. If you’ve ever seen birds fly in formation, then you know that everything eventually follows a pattern, and that the leaders (influencers, if you will) often self-select midstream. Metrics help you track not only specific, linear data sets but also that type of malleable data online.

Measuring everything includes measuring the offline efforts you’re making for your brand. This measurement requires some finesse. Using links, hashtags, keywords, familiar icons referring to your social profiles, and specific landing pages on your website for each medium of advertising or contact, as well as having the customers self-select which campaign brought them in, will all contribute to your measurement efforts. Increasing the scope of what you measure requires clear calls to action and tracking.

In this chapter, I show you some of the ways you can start measuring everything.