6 steps to measure social media

Measurement expert Katie Paine explains why measuring social media campaigns is about engagement—not eyeballs

Goodbye, eyeballs—hello, conversations. Now that social media is taking over more of your time, you need to learn to measure the results of your efforts. Katie Paine, president of KDPaine & Partners, explains that measuring the impact of blogs and podcasts isn’t all that more difficult than measuring your mainstream media coverage. In fact, it may be easier.

“Social media is much more transactional. You can count the number of people who visit your Web site,” says Paine.

In other words, blog posts about your company can drive traffic to your site—and that’s easy to quantify. On the other hand, the impact of the “eyeballs” reading a story in The Wall Street Journal is much more nebulous.

Measuring eyeballs, or using conventional measurement tactics, on social media output won’t tell you how your messages are doing, Paine says.

“You’d be counting the wrong things, and then you’d miss the conversations.” And in social media, conversations are what it’s all about: “It’s not about screaming at people—it’s about listening to people.”