Wednesday, April 14, 2010

You're Gonna Need a Ruler For This One

As the new media intern at my current internship, one of my responsibilities is maintaining and updating our social networking sites. But at the end of the day, how does my supervisor know that I'm not just doing my job- but doing my job well.

How do we put a number on the human interactions that take place on Facebook or Twitter? There is no cookie-cutter answer to this question, but there are tips and guidelines that companies can follow in order to measure their ROI relating to social networking.

These measures can be divided into two areas: qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative measurements give insight to the quality of the connections that are occurring on your social networking sites. For example, it's not just about how many Facebook fans you have, but how many of them are commenting, engaging in discussion, re-tweeting, or posting to your site. Have 137,560 fans or followers means nothing if they aren't actively involved!

Yesterday I met a girl in Pennsylvania at an anti-human trafficking lobby day that said to us, "I found out about this information through the Facebook invitation that you posted [on your fan page]". It felt good to know that my posts were not falling on deaf ears, and even better to know that my supervisor was standing right next to me!

Quantitative measurements are where these numbers, like Facebook fans, start to matter. I am constantly looking at our Analytics page to see how many people read our blog, and more importantly- how many new users read our blog. Obviously, our dedicated readers are extremely important to us, but we also need to know how to attract new readers and bring in more traffic. Measuring the amount of Facebook friends or Twitter followers you have helps you recognize what you're doing well and should continue doing OR if you lose friends, what you need to stop doing.

If my post doesn't make sense- it's not my fault. There's no easy answer to this question, right?

2 comments:

  1. Hopefully your blog and work at your internship is gets better responses then my blog haha. I think it's tough to measure how well you are doing on something like facebook or twitter because you can have tons of followers, but how many actually read your tweets? I guess you can't actually know. Oh well, nice final post.

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  2. Wow! That was lucky to have your supervisor overhear that little comment! And I find social networking an interesting phenomenon...depending on which culture you're dealing with you will have more direct responses to your tweets or facebooks or whatevers (a discovery made from our last assignment).

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