Business.gov (“the Official Business Link to the U.S. Government”) posted recently an article on quantifying your social media efforts.  The article provides a list of social media benchmarks, which should be helpful for any organization.

• Are you using video to market your small business? Not sure it’s worthwhile? Well, consider this: 62% of adult American Internet users watch videos on video-sharing sites* such as YouTube.com.
• If your Facebook business Fan page has more than 100 fans, you are in the top 65%* of all users.
• If you post at least one Twitter update per day, you are among the top 15% most active Twitter users*.
• If you have 100 Twitter followers or more, you are among the top 7% of Twitter users as measured by number of followers.

If you need help hitting any of these benchmarks, govfresh recently had a good article on the subject, titled “Social media in government is like riding a bike.”

Why do I tell this story? Because I think government can greatly benefit from a “small glider bike” when first taking on social media. Too many agencies are reluctant to try not just because they’re afraid of falling, but because some mistakes lead to severe consequences.