Social Media is a hard thing to measure, so much so that entire businesses have been established and bankrolled with the sole purpose of attempting to calculate ROI (Return on Investment), value, and success metrics for social media campaigns, initiatives, and programs.
But the calculations in the marketplace are cakewalk compared to the success metrics that we could probably conjure up.
Your job is to create them, make them make sense to your strategy and organization, and then establish a roadmap whereby you will be able to measure success.
Remember, the criterion for success is going to be different for every organization. What you need to do is to match as closely as possible your expectations with an actual number. Oftentimes that’s pretty tough too.
More thoughts after the jump:
Measuring Engagement
Increased traffic, comments, hits to social bookmarking sites, and tweets doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re being successful in social media. The fine line is when you begin to ask yourself if these numerical increases are answering the problems (or are the solutions) to what your community needs.
For example, your ministry blogger could post a blog that’s asking the question: “What Should We Serve at Wednesday’s Potluck?” and it get’s reTweeted 100+ times. Awesome, right? But what if no one actually answers the question on the blog? Even though it’s been reTweeted a lot you still don’t have your answer that you needed, and apparently no one’s going to get fed on Wednesday. That doesn’t sound like “success” to me.
Social Media is only as good as the fulfilment of the intended use through the various channels and means that you employ and use. So what if you’re on every Social Network on the planet? Are you getting an significant increase of traffic to warrant the time, commitment, and energy in launching them?
Measuring engagement is a challenge, but it’s well worth it in the long run. Ask yourself and your ministry the hard questions about what “success looks like” and then create metrics around those pictures.
[Image from Vatsug]
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