Measuring Social Media's Value

Tracking and measurement is essential to the successful implementation of any marketing program. When it comes to measuring social media's value, there are several key metrics:

• General campaign results, like inbound inquiries, foot/website traffic, coupon redemption, transaction data, etc.
• Web analytics, like page views, content, referrers, stickiness, landing pages, etc.
• Data from third party software placed on your site. For example, email tools like Constant Contact allow you to socialize your communications and measure them. Social widgets, like those from Friendfeed and Blog Catalog, also provide data.
• Online stats, like link popularity, page rank, etc., offer insights about how your social media marketing is working.
• Then there are stats from the social sites themselves, like Insights, which tells you how your Facebook Page is doing.
• Finally, there are reputation monitoring tools. Radian6 and the like are comprehensive, but expensive. Many low and no cost tools are available to the small business, but you may need to patch several together to get the data you want.

I've included several chapters in my book, Social Persuasion, on the topic. It starts with gaining an understanding of what you need to measure, recommendations for low and no-cost tools, and an explanation of how to review, analyze and interpret the data.