If you do a simple search online, you will find a lot of information regarding the measurement of social media and ROI (return on investment). ROI will always be the standard to measure the ultimate success, but many other metrics available can provide you with information if you are on the right track with your strategy.
Here’s a couple of performance indicators that I use to help determine if we are on the right track.
Communities: The easiest and the first to track is building online communities on various social media channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
Traffic: To track traffic is also easy and you can use Google Analytics and Bit.ly (shorten URL service) for this.
Conversations: A key statistic you can track is how well your online communities respond and engage with your efforts. You can track the number of engagement on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can check how many likes and comments you received on Facebook, retweets on Twitter, and discussions taking place on LinkedIn.
Leads: If you want to track sales leads, you will have to implement some sort of tracking results. You can use specific campaign forms, lead tracking phone numbers, tracking URL’s, or you can simply ask the people that contacts you how they found you. These are just a couple of the tracking methods available.
If you have trouble tracking your social media efforts, try using our methods above to measure your your efforts. Remember that at the end of the day, the only true score is ROI.