For some people, social media is almost like a sport. How many followers can you get? How many subscribers can you get?
For other people, social media is their livelihood - it is how they put food on the table.
One thing that I think a lot of people struggle with is trying to single out the factors that make the biggest impact on their performance in social media.
For example, it might be your goal to get 1000 subscribers to your blog. Things have been pretty flat for the last month or so, but this week your blog has experienced a huge jump in the number of subscribers.
You have probably been employing any number of methods to promote the posts you have been putting on your blog - promoting them on Twitter, submitting them to services like Digg, making changes to your site to ensure it is SEO friendly, listing your blog on directories, making guest posts on other blogs, and so on.
The trouble is that often you have no real idea which of these activities has actually contributed to the sudden increase in your subscribers. You can often make an educated guess as to what the root cause might be - but you need to get as scientific as you can if you want to make the most of your future time spent on marketing activities.
