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The final module in your digital influencer skill building cover a central aspect. The art of measuring the impact of your influencing activities. To tell if you win or if you lose. And to guide your choice of what to do more of, and what to do less of.

Measure the growth of your digital footprint

Digital marketing and digital influencing is all about metrics. Selecting from the ones that exists. And to measure impact of each activity. A job where it is easy to chase numbers on available, but less important metrics. Instead of focusing on the ones where you have a clear impact.

The following can serve as a starting point:

• New connections made in digital domain – generating a virtual or real coffee conversation.
• Interactions on LinkedIn – measured as connections, quality of connections and engagements. Aspire to trigger an interesting “thread” your network engage with.
• Twitter – Basics like followers, following and tweets. Expanded to interactions with your content in the form of clicks and retweets. Or on-line conversations with a respected super connector.
• Your Klout score – an on-line measure aggregating the impact from all your accounts.

This was almost the starting point for my journey. With a miserable Klout score, no twitter handle and sub-par LinkedIn network. Early replaced with a strategy to first connecting on LinkedIn with all I knew in person. Second by building a twitter audience, measured almost daily. And third by a drive to bet the Klout score for a digital persona I knew well.

Define target metrics for next quarter

Build a habit of defining target metrics for your next quarter. Design around how you would like to tune your approach.

What you want to do more of. Both for building your network and positing exciting content. Creating content and digital engagements with others.

What you want to do less of. Test different approached and pivot away from approaches without results. Kill your darlings if the metrics don’t show they are effective.

New initiatives you want to take. Steal ideas from what seem to be working for others. Add pictures where your use text only. Add animated GIFs where you used to post pictures. Limit your content postings to only Infographics for a week or two.

This approach I did not follow from start on my journey. I fell short in only doing the DO and DON’T part of the guide. Did hang in too long with questionable approaches where numbers were off from start. But learned once I started to exploit visuals in engagements.

Tune your concept to what works best for you

Each digital influencer journey is different. Often boiling down to the digital purpose you defined in week 1.

This goes for preference and success among platforms. How much time you can and are willing to dedicate. And which topics you build your influencer reputation around.

What you want to get out of your journey is your choice. Be open to pivot whenever you feel you are off track. Either in what you want to measure. And how you perform towards your target metrics. But never stop measuring what you do. Then you have lost your digital influencer anchor, in the real world of making an impact.

My early obsession for daily improvements was frustrating for friends and family. #AlwaysConnected #OftenTweeting #DigitalReplacingRealLife. Now I set more realistic goals for content creation, sharing and engagements. And trust my gut feeling what a suitable ambition should be.

Checklist for week 13

Measure the growth of your digital footprint

• New connections made in the digital domain – leading to F2F meetings
• LinkedIn: Contacts, Engagement generated with posts
• Twitter: Tweets, Followers, Following
• Klout: a summary index for all your platforms

Define target metrics for next quarter

• Things I want to do more of: Posts, Followers, Engagements, etc.
• Things I want to do less of:
• New initiatives I want to take

Tune the concept for your social media activities to what work best for you

Thank you for investing your time in my ideas on how you can become a digital influencer. I hope you have found them inspiring and valuable. And I look forward to stay engaged with you on Twitter. where you find me as @TweeterLinder, your digital mentor.