Measurement is your friend

It is easy to get despondent in the early days when you start the process of growing your author influence on social media…but remember that measurement is your friend. 

You can’t see your progress if you don’t track it.

The key thing to remember is there are two types of results you need to capture to show your progress:

• Your actions
• Your outcomes

The outcomes will take longer to come. Even if you post and comment regularly as planned, growing followers and engagement will take time. 

You have to commit to completing all your actions every week and measure how well you achieve this.

Set up a spreadsheet and track both your daily actions and your outcomes every week. 

Your actions

These are the tactical activities that if completed consistently over time will deliver the outcomes you want to see. These are likely to be:

• The number of people you follow/connect with 
• Number of comments you make
• Number of posts you make

Your outcomes

These are the metrics you have decided determine the success you are looking for and move you towards your goal.

You need to decide what will show growth for you. It’s important to keep it simple, so I would suggest using the standard social metrics available within most platforms. There’s wide debate about the value of these figures, but they give some indication as to the success of your actions. 

Typical indicators are:

• Your follower/connections count
• Engagement
• Impressions

As you start to use measurement as a tool to help you succeed there are a few things to remember: 

1. Commit to improving

By measuring your actions every week you can really help yourself improve. Even if you weren’t able to hit your action targets this week. You can be clear on what you did achieve and commit to doing a bit more next week.

2. Don’t abandon measurement when you’re having a bad day or week.

This is a common mistake – to give up measuring when you don’t like what you see. If you do this you won’t get to perform at your best and achieve your goals. Be brave and stick with it.

3. Try to identify what your numbers mean

Whether your actions and results are up or down compared with the previous week, try to identify why the numbers have changed. That way you can make improvements and get back on track or build on successful activities.

Over time you will be able to see the effectiveness of different actions on your results.