So, You've Got a Lot of Facebook Friends. Now What?

Tracking your progress
Once you start this process, how do you track if you’re making progress before you get donations?

“Social media is the culmination of marketing, customer service and communications in real time in front of everyone,” says Eve Mayer Orsburn, author of “Social Media for the CEO.” “Any tool that affords you to do so much and reach so many people for free cannot be summed up with one simple measurement.”

The problem is there’s just too much data! Did you know that there are more than 1.9 billion people online? And this number is only going to grow by 2020. There are more than 5 million terabytes of data on the Internet. To give you an idea of how big that is, Google’s index only includes about 200 terabytes of data, which means Google has indexed only 0.004 percent of all data on the Internet. The human brain can only hold 1 to 10 terabytes of data. So no wonder you’re feeling overwhelmed!

What are metrics?
Metrics are how to see if you’re getting heard by enough people to move your business forward.

For your website, you can use Google Analytics to measure:

• Uniques: This is the number of unique visitors your website has.
• Visits: How many times people visit your site in a given period of time.
• Your most popular content: What do people read a lot?
• How people find you: What keywords lead people to your site?

For your social-media channels, it’s worthwhile to measure:

• How many followers you have;
• How many times your content gets spread by others; and
• The general tenor of comments about you, aka sentiment analysis or sentiment metrics.

Which metrics are important?

• Metrics that measure your engagement on social media channels;
• Metrics that measure engagement on your website; and
• Metrics that measure your bottom line after your social-media campaign.

Remember that data is not information. You need to translate your data into something you can act on.