The True Way To Monitor Social Media

'10 Cool Social Media Monitoring Tools' was posted by someone on Facebook - and I suppose those tools are good for monitoring... stuff... but it seems to me that so close after its inception people are forgetting what the true value of social media is - and how to measure it. It isn't a matter of how many connections you have, how many followers you have or even how many visitors you have on a page.

In an age where people skim headlines on Facebook and click 'like' without actually reading the linked article, the value of 'the number of likes' is at best debatable and at worst severely misleading. And retweets? The number of retweets really doesn't mean that much for the same reason - people may just pass things along without reading them only later to disagree with them.

There's only one true way to measure social media: The conversation and the value of it for the people involved. If you're in business, it's about how it positively - or negatively - impacts your business. Having a thriving social media circus on your hands really doesn't mean anything but additional cost unless you're getting something worthwhile back - like more sales or better reputation (customer service). And the customers and clients interacting with your business also must get something back - ranging from warm fuzzies to superior service to superior products.

Sure, in your spare time you can count things. But that is also time you could be using to create value for your customers and yourself - or if you're not going to do that, you can go spend some time away from work, your PC and your social networks.

Being active in a social network, in much the same way, has little value unless you bring something to it. Staring at monitoring tools only gets you thinking of potential and real customers and clients as statistics - and they're not.