I could talk on and on about how we can measure our social media success, but I’m going to keep this short and sweet because let’s face it, although metrics are important, they aren’t much fun.

There are a million ways to look at how your social media assets (your Facebook Fan page, Twitter Account, blog, LinkedIn profile etc) are serving you, but if you are just starting out in the social sphere, its best to set some benchmarks and then monitor over time.

How to set your social media benchmarks.

Look at the volume of activity your assets are generating.  Ask yourself:

• How many friends/followers do I have? (volume)
• How often are my constituents retweeting, commenting on my blog and Facebook pages, and recommending me on LinkedIn? (engagement)
• How much time am I spending on each site per day? (Investment)
• How many leads/conversions can I attribute to each asset? (ROI)

You might want to map this out in an excel spreadsheet and revisit weekly, monthly or even quarterly to determine what is working and what is just draining your time.  Your analysis might look something like this.

The golden rule of measuring social media is really to look at what you are spending your time on verses how much you are gaining from that activity.  If Facebook is taking up a ton of your time, but you get a great deal of workshop sign ups from it, then keep doing what you are doing.  If you are slogging away at a blog, yet you can’t seem to get any purchases for your ebook, then it might be time to tweak your approach, or do something else.

The key here is to constantly ask yourself, what works, what doesn’t and what do you need to change?

Here are some tips for measuring your media assets

• Twitter – Hootsuite gives you a free, comprehensive look at your follower engagement
• Facebook has a great tool for measuring Fan Page activity.  Not so, for personal pages and groups unfortunately.
• Wordpress/Blogger etc – give you a count of all your comments per posting.
• LinkedIn is pretty straight forward, and if you are having trouble counting all your recommendations, then you should be writing this article, not me!
• Forums and Blogs that you read – just keep a mental idea of how much volume you are contributing to each portal and document weekly.
• Google Analytics – this is a must-have tool to add to your site.  It will tell you where your visitors are coming from, which is key to answering the ROI portion of your metric analysis.
• Klout is a great tool for measuring your overall social presence, but it’s not going to give you the ROI perspective from each individual site.

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