Social media metrics: 4 that matter, 3 that distract

Over at {grow}, Srininvas Rao wrote a post about the three most dangerous social media metrics and the four that really matter. Because his advice is so excellent, I want to share it with you.

First, the three most dangerous metrics:

1. Traffic: You don’t just want visitors, you want the right visitors.

At The Measurement Standard, we had a StumbleUpon experience similar to the one Rao relates in his article. StumbleUpon picked up one of our interesting but somewhat off-topic articles and brought us tremendous traffic, but few visitors read anything else. That traffic was, and continues to be, a pain because it skews our statistics.

2. Tweets, likes, fans and followers: Do you want to be popular, or do you want to do business? They’re often not the same.

3. Comments: It’s tempting to think commenters are a focus group of your readers, but those who comment only represent a fraction of your readers. Most commenters leave comments because of something other than what the majority of your readers are interested in.

Second, the metrics you should measure: