Social media ROI and metrics: how do you measure if your campaign is working? And, what is meant by “working” in this context?

It isn’t unusual for a business to jump on the social media bandwagon without really knowing what to expect. After all, it’s often said that “everyone” needs to be on (fill in the blank with Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, YouTube and so forth) and you aren’t to be blamed if you’ve taken the leap without knowing how you’re going to measure social media impact.

According to the 2009 Mzinga & Babson Executive Education report, a report referenced by Brian Solis, 84% of professionals who participate in social media do not measure for return on investment. Here’s the flaw with that. It’s hard to tweak and improve what you don’t quantify – which means that, if you take on the challenge to effectively measure social media efforts, you’ll move ahead of a significant portion of businesses – most likely including some of your competitors.

Once you make the commitment to measure, though, your question probably is – now what?

Well, before you try to measure social media efforts, it’s important to turn your expectations, which may be somewhat vague, into concrete goals.

For now, even though increased leads, conversions and sales will probably end up at the top of your list when setting business goals, let’s start with more straightforward examples of how to measure the success of social media campaigns. (Don’t worry; we’ll cover how to measure website traffic, leads, conversions, sales and so forth in depth in our follow up post!)

Let’s say that, as our first example, you have struggled with unfair negative comments being posted online about your company – and that frustrates you and hurts your bottom line. If so, then setting business goals to improve your online reputation through social media efforts makes good sense. You could quantify that goal by saying that you want to reduce the number of negative comments in the top ten search engine results pages by 50% – and then perhaps by 100%.

When setting business goals in the area of online reputation management, you can measure social media success by calculating a baseline number of negative comments and then regularly checking your progress after you promote great content and engage personally with prospects and customers through social media channels.

Are you also seeing an increase in positive mentions of your brand? Quantify that, as well. In fact, you may want to create four categories for your data: positive, negative, neutral and mixed comments; mixed may include comments where someone praises your product quality but complains about shipping time.

Also do a backlinks check to see if the number of hyperlinked references to your site is growing. What kind of text do you find when you conduct your backlinks check? Positive? Negative? Mixed? No matter which, be sure to quantify!

When setting business goals for the year, perhaps your executive team agreed that becoming a respected thought leader online was important.

In this somewhat related goal, it’s important to increase the size of your network. After all, the more people that you have as your audience, the more likely it is that you can build momentum to become viral with your contents.

So, what can you offer to cause more people to like your Facebook page, follow your Twitter account, network with you on LinkedIn and add you to their Google Plus circles?

Measure how much each of your networks increases in size – but also measure how often people engage with you. How many likes do your Facebook statuses get? How much are they increasing? How many comments were you getting when you first started posting on Facebook? How many are you getting now?

How many times do people retweet what you’ve tweeted? Do these retweets get passed along by followers of your followers?

How many times have Google Plus posts, let’s say written by your CEO, received +1 kudos? How many of those posts get shared?

Let’s say that you’re highlighting your blog postsin social media venues. What’s happening, numerically speaking, for your company? Is the number of blog comments increasing? Are people talking about your content at del.icio.us, Digg and StumbleUpon?

By analyzing these types of numbers, along with monitoring what’s being said about your company online, you can quantify how much ground you are gaining in your quest to become a respected thought leader on the internet.

Check back often for more posts about social media ROI and metrics, including how to capture data about website traffic, leads, conversions and sales.

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