MN Interactive

7 Easy Ways to Measure Social Media

Once you’ve set up your blog, signed up for twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, you might wonder, what next? You’re using them regularly, but are you using them successfully? While a lot of these sites are free to all, you’ll still need to invest time and money to take advantage of their full potential. But are they allowing you to reach your target audience? And what is the return on the investment you make?

As social media has grown in leaps and bounds, it has become accountable to its users. However, there isn’t a single method by which you can measure its success, or yours. In a way, you can apply the same tools you’ve been using for traditional media to measure the impact social media creates on your business. But online tallying also calls for more specialized means of assessing how your plan is working.

1. Followers do matter: Let’s play the numbers game. How many followers do you have on twitter ? Fans on Facebook? Connects on LinkedIn? Follow the leaders on these sites in your industry to see how many they have. Next, compare interaction levels between both your sites. Having someone follow you is cool, but it doesn’t really count if they are inactive and their presence static. It’s how your users behave which is important. Take the following two examples with Twitter and Facebook, and apply them to any social media tool you use, including blogs, YouTube, MySpace etc.

• Twitter: Do your followers retweet your message? Use your DM box? Follow you because you follow them, or because they are interested in your services? Act on your offers?

• Facebook: How many have signed up and has it been for a particular campaign? Do they comment/like your posts? Are they active on the wall?

2. Test them: Gather the information you receive and test them. The simplest way to do this is to DM your community a message which allows you to gather their email via opt-in. Once you have gathered them legitimately, do a test run via your provider (aweber or constant contact work well to create test runs) to see response rates.

2. Measure visitors once they arrive: You can also measure audience using tools to capture page views, time spent on site, frequency of visit, and conversion rates. Web analytical tools like Google Analytics (link) provide an easy means to gather information in one go.

3. Redefine your end goals: They might change over time, but keep up with the changes and consider the following: Social Bookmarking– who is adding your posts to sites like Delicious (link), Stumbleupon (link) and Reddit? Your web analytical tool might allow you to track visitors who do so, or you can bookmark these sites and keep checking for your URL on a regular basis.

4. Cross-analyze linking to your site: You can also measure how many people are subscribing to your RSS feed, or link back to your site (WordPress has a feature which allows you to check this), or by checking on Technorati (link).

5. Take note of less obvious measurement benchmarks: These are the good old fashion customer service tools to see if your customers are really happy with the services you offer, your SEO rankings, leads and referrals you receive etc.

6. Don’t forget the more obvious calculable ones: Like the investment that’s gone into your online marketing campaign, and the actual sales you’ve generated from it. Revisit your profits to see if your budgets can be sustained and need to be redirected.

7. Make PR your friend: Business owners often forget about public relations in its free or paid form, yet it can be a very strong measure of how well your business is capable of doing. Nowadays, PR and Marketing are almost becoming interchangeable, as what better way to get your message across than to brag about it on your blog or post it on twitter. If you can measure PR, you will be a strong position to measure social media.