When we’re talking to companies about the benefits of social media as a marketing tool, we often hear, “Yeah, I see how it has its benefits, but how can I know it’s helping my business?” Good question.

Set Goals

If you don’t plan on climbing to the top of a mountain and simply set off on a hike, chances are you aren’t going to push yourself to the top. It’s the same with social media success. If you don’t establish what you’re trying to achieve, it’s unlikely you’ll get there. Before you can begin to measure the effectiveness of your efforts on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites, you have to know your main goals.

Maybe you want to increase traffic—direct or indirect—to your site. Or maybe you want to improve customer satisfaction. Your main priority might be to increase brand awareness or improve your brand’s reputation.

Whatever you want to accomplish, define where you want to go. Set a reasonable timeframe. Decide on how you’re going to get there (more on that in a later post), and then track your results.

Keep Score

Depending on your goals, you can see the success of your social media investment (whether you’re investing time or money) and your ROI through improvements or increases in some of the following areas:

• direct and/or indirect traffic to your site and/or blog
• online brand mentions
• leads
• brand awareness
• sales
• customer satisfaction scores
• brand perception
• online brand mentions
• comments on your blog
• frequency of customers/peers linking to your content

Some people/companies measure their social media success in part through their number of Twitter followers or Facebook fans. I don’t think that’s the best option because you don’t know how many of those followers/fans are actually interested in or paying attention to what you’re putting out there. You don’t want people only to see your message. You want them to 1) listen, 2) care, and 3) take action.

Instead of just looking at the number of people who follow you, look at stronger statistics. For example, if your goal is to improve sentiment toward your brand, conduct a baseline survey before you begin. Follow up with another survey in a year to see if (and by how much) sentiment improved.

Whether you’re measuring your effectiveness through surveys, sales, or traffic analytics on your site, just make sure you take a baseline measurement prior to launching your social media campaign, so you’ll know whether or not you’re accomplishing your goals. If you’re not seeing the results you wanted within your set timeframe, tweak your tweets and other methods of outreach.

In addition to using traffic analytics, sales numbers, and/or surveys, you can monitor your social media outreach through a growing number of online tools. Personally, I like to use most of the sites’ info to help us realize how we can improve our outreach, so we can increase the chances of meeting our goals. The following are just three of my faves:

PostRank Analytics- This site monitors readers’ engagement on your blog. It reveals how and when people are sharing your postings, so you can see your audience’s level of interest in what you’re putting out there.

SocialToo- Among other services, SocialToo will send you a daily e-mail summarizing your new and lost followers. More importantly, it’ll also tell you what tweets you posted around the time you lost followers, so you can see what might have driven them away.

GraphEdge- It’s still in the Beta stage, but GraphEdge provides graphs with metrics like your number of legitimate Twitter followers (bikini-clad followers spamming get-rich schemes aren’t included) and follow/unfollow activity.

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