Are your social media metrics diagnostic or objective?

If you don’t know the difference, your measurement program is in trouble

One of my favorite discussion points in my social media ROI talk is one of the most overlooked—the understanding of diagnostic versus objective metrics.

Imagine for a second you’re on a road trip.

Diagnostic metrics tell you how the trip is going.
Objective metrics tell you when you’re there.

As you can imagine, there aren’t too many objective metrics. You’re either at your destination, or you’re still on the road trip. There are tons of diagnostic metrics, such as mileage, miles traveled, rest areas stopped at, complaints from the back seat. You name it, there’s probably a metric for it.

In social media, we have lots of diagnostic metrics as well. Twitter followers, Web site traffic, retweets, Facebook likes, and so on.

At the end of the day, however, none of these are objectives. None of them tell you if you’re actually there yet.