Number crunchers love them; the rest of us are intimidated by them.

Analytics and metrics for social media are so bountiful as to be either a feast or overwhelming, depending on your attitude toward numbers. But the one thing they are not is insufficient.

Metrics are measurements, such as the number of clicks, page visits, visitors, and so on.  Analytics are software programs that help analyze the performance of marketing campaigns including email, website, and social media.

No matter what social medium you use, what browser, what software, you can easily and inexpensively measure and evaluate social media effectiveness.

The trick is in choosing what you really need to measure.

Do you want to know if you are attracting more visitors to your website or do you want to know if those who come are becoming engaged with the site, the value you add, and your marketing campaigns? What keywords get better response?

At different stages in your social media journey, you’ll want to measure different things. And that’s the beauty of social media: You can measure the results of your efforts daily if you want to and you can change what you look at as your organization launches new projects or expands its social media presence.

Our survey of nonprofits last year found that about 40 percent of nonprofits shy away from social media because they don’t see the value of it or because they don’t believe you can measure results.

Research by others has shown that small businesses are equally reluctant to deal with such alien concepts as bounce rates, impressions, likes, and followers.

To overcome those obstacles to using social media, Ventureneer’s free ebook, Social Media for Your Nonprofit: Take Charge!, has a section that addresses those objections. It explains the jargon of measurement and guides you in selecting what to measure.

Our goal in writing the ebook was just that: Break down some of the walls separating nonprofits and small businesses from social media. Check out the ebook, then tell us what more you’d like to know about social media, what obstacles there are that we missed, and we’ll see what we can do to help.