Social Media Metrics For Dummies

Making Your Metrics Business-Centric

One of the key things you can do to make your metrics pull better data is to make them business-centric. Focus the data you pull on your business and your competitors’ businesses. Pay close attention to your customers’ needs and to what they say about not only your brand, but also what they want and need.

How do you do all of that? Create a system of link, referral, and keyword tracking; set achievable goals; and run specific, targeted campaigns. Create optimized content for sharing and conversion.

Listen to your customers through your metrics so that you can deliver what they want — they may not be interacting with your brand to get content, for example, but to get help. Metrics allow you to discover that goal.

Keywords

Not all keywords are created equal. Different segments of keywords gather different types of information. Visual planning helps me create better keyword metrics, but visualizing the data you want to gather may not work for you.

Create a mind map. I use Mindjet, which isn’t free, but you can use several free options, such as XMind. Use a business goal as the center of the map and branch out from there into keyword groupings.

As you create your map, notice that your keywords naturally begin to fall into related categories. Those categories in turn are relevant to different aspects of your business.

As you begin to dive into your ...