Chapter 10: Measurement and Evaluation
Our book has talked about a lot of interesting and exciting things throughout its chapters. Unfortunately in Chapter 10 we talk about math and numbers. Most public relations, communications or social media majors choose this path because of its lack of numbers and its lack of math. Math is something that is important to social media because it is needed for measurement and evaluation of the success of specific social media content.
The book explains that measurement and evaluation go hand in hand for many different campaigns. Measurement focuses on specific amounts and reflecting change while evaluation focuses on the assessment of these values. Why do these need to happen? Why is it important to follow up with an evaluation? Well, this is all so important because it ties directly to social media practices. There is a measurement framework that helps companies format their evaluation to hit all the important variables. This framework focuses on objectives, inputs, activities, outputs, outtakes, outcomes and impact.
If social media professionals just complete and campaign and leave then there would be no growth in the industry. Without the measurement and evaluation of what we are doing there would be no change in what is happening each day online. Even day-to-day people are doing a form of measurement on their social media. We post content that gets the most likes or engagement. Nothing super fancy but I post more pictures of myself or activities I have done. Why would I do that? I do it because I noticed that when I post a random selfies on a saturday it gets 195 likes versus when I post a picture of me skiing and I get 270 likes on my picture. It is all about focusing on the engagement and that is measurement in itself. That is a more simplified version of what the professionals do, but you get what I mean now.
As you can see finding a way to measure and evaluate your social campaigns is an important part of what professionals do. Next time you think that communication majors don’t do math think again! We have to measure and evaluate every single thing we do.
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