Last week, our CEO Ben Dickens wrote about engagement via web traffic , highlighting some of the basic principles of how to analyse user visits on websites. However, while most businesses grasp the importance of measuring on-site interaction and engagement, when it comes to social media, much is forgotten.

For example, it’s good practice to filter out your office IP address from your Google Analytics account. Visits to your website from employees or computers in the office aren’t the kind of visits you’re trying to measure. At Quad , we have to filter out our office and some of our regular freelancers to ensure our traffic numbers reflect our actual audience.

But this is a principle that frequently goes out of the window in social, especially among the many companies who consider likes, retweets and shares from employees to represent bona fide engagement with the brand.

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