All right, so as marketers and organizations, when we spend time and money on trying to
do anything, especially something as important as promoting our product or promoting our
brand, we want to find a way to figure out what kind of impact are we having
And in today's world, social media is one of the main ways that we do promote ourselves
or our products. But since it's new technology, it can be tricky to figure out exactly how to measure the impact
of our social media use. There's room to grow here, but there are some things that we have available to us today
in order to track this or measure this impact. So one is platform metrics
So Facebook, Instagram, any platform that you're going to use has some built-in metrics
to help you understand how many people you're reaching, how many people are following you
for example, things like that. And that's a very useful way for us to kind of track our activity or our impact on social media
For a higher level option, we have services such as Hootsuite, which kind of create a
more robust set of metrics, allow us to kind of combine everything so that we can see
for example, what happened across different platforms when we released a new product or
when we put this message out or this news release. So tools like that that are kind of analytical suites or packages are also very helpful
Another way we can approach this, which does require some metrics of other kinds, but a
good sort of way of thinking about it is looking at sales versus our activity on social media
So I kind of alluded to that a minute ago where we kind of compare, you know, when we
did this, what happened with sales? That's a meaningful comparison that really shows the direct impact of our social media use
Lastly, one thing we can do to measure impact on social media is social listening
And this is just a way of paying attention to what's being said on social media about
us or about competition, you know, things like that. We just need to pay attention to what people are saying, and that'll be a good reflection
of the impact we've had as well. So while there's still more technical things that could be figured out, and I'm sure in
the near future they will be figured out, this challenge of measuring the impact of
social media is still there, but we do have these tools or these ways to go about it
And like anything else we do as an organization, we absolutely should be trying to measure
the impact of social media use