When should you ditch your social media program?

Getting yourself out of social media is another question altogether. How do you judge program performance? How do you know if the ends justify the means? How can you tell whether you’re one tweet away from a roaring success or only throwing good money after bad?

Here are factors to consider when determining whether it’s time to make a strategic withdrawal from social media.

Decide with metrics

One of the silliest ideas floating around is that social media is somehow above or beyond statistical analysis. Don’t buy into this thinking. If your social media program does not have metrics in place, you’ll need to put them in place and track performance for several months to make an informed decision on whether to continue or terminate your effort.

Whatever your program’s goal, there are performance metrics that can be associated with it. For instance, retweets and mentions are measures of brand awareness. Blog and Facebook comments are measures of engagement. Referred traffic and form fills are measures of conversion.

For a plug-pulling discussion, the key consideration is not magnitude, but the trend. If numbers are going up, keep going. If numbers are flat or declining—and you can’t think of ideas for improving—consider other marketing options.