Most social media strategists agree that there is no one, established framework to measure social media success. However, there are tactics you can adjust and apply to any social media strategy to help create a framework that works for you.

This article can help you develop an individualized, social media measuring framework. Follow these four steps:

Know your goals

1Any good marketing plan starts with established goals. You need to know what your goals are before you can measure how successful your efforts have been to achieve them.

What do you want to accomplish through your social media efforts? Some possibilities include:

• Sell more products
• Get more reviews
• Establish yourself as a thought leader
• Drive more traffic to your website
• Generate leads
• Increase your fan base
• Reach a specific demographic

Outline very specific goals so you can measure the results of your efforts.

Establish your baselines

2Based on your goals from step one, establish measurable baselines you can use for comparison later.

Create a spreadsheet that includes:

• Current sales numbers
• Review counts
• Number of hits in Google
• Website stats
• Other baselines specific to your goals

Clearly, some things are easier to measure than others. Quantitative elements like sales, website stats, and Google hits can be tracked easily. However, more qualitative elements such as thought leadership, influence, or customer satisfaction can be trickier to measure.

You may be surprised at just how many things are measurable in social media. Check out this post entitled “100 Ways to Measure Social Media” posted by Marketers Studio in 2009. This lists demonstrates that there are many things that can be measured. Your job is to establish which items are true indicators of your efforts based on your established goals.

Track your efforts

3There are plenty of tools you can use to help measure your social media efforts. Internal features of social media tools like Facebook and WordPress, free external tools, and paid services can all give you insight into how well certain strategies are paying off.

It is important during this step to use more than one tool to track your efforts. Each individual tool can give you specific insight into one or more aspects of your social media presence. Together, a carefully selected host of tools can give you a complete picture of how your efforts are paying off.

It’s also important to focus only on the data that are relevant to your goals. It’s easy to get lost in the “numbers” and lose track of your goals. Some of the data may not be relevant to your goals – focus on the data that are.

Internal tools

Start your tracking and analysis from within many of the tools you already have in place. Here are a few to get you started.

Facebook Insights

Facebook’s statistics tool, Insights, can help you track and analyze demographics, engagement, referrals, click-throughs, and more for your Facebook pages. Access this tool from the main menu when you edit any Facebook page.

Facebook Insights breaks down the demographics and activities of a page’s fans. This feature also allows you to gain insight into how users engage with specific content, where your referrals are coming from, how well individual posts are doing, and more.

The latest version of Facebook Insights includes demographics and metrics for overall Facebook page activity, the reach of your Facebook content, the people who “like” your content, and insights on how your content is shared.

When viewing these metrics, keep your goals and baselines in mind.

WordPress Stats

If your website or blog is powered by WordPress, there are a number of good plugins that can help you analyze your site. I recommend WordPress.com Stats, mainly because it is developed by the WordPress.com team.

Using this plug-in, you can get a very good picture of how visitors are interacting with your site: which of your posts are the most popular, where your incoming referrals are coming from, which key terms visitors are using to find your site, which outgoing links are clicked, and more. You can drill down to get more details on many of the stats, but keep in mind that only you are going to know which results are relevant to your specific goals.

FeedBurner

Burning your RSS feed or blog to FeedBurner means that your blog subscriptions (either via feed reader or email) can be managed, optimized, and analyzed using the FeedBurner service. You can see which of your posts are the most popular, drill down on your subscriber demographics, and more.

HootSuite

HootSuite is a platform to help you manage one or more Twitter accounts as well as integrate your other social media tools and blogs with Twitter.

In addition, HootSuite has some nice analysis tools you can use to analyze your Twitter accounts. Their pro version also allows you to integrate Facebook Insights and Google Analytics so you have a one-stop place to get insight on your social Web presence.

This tool can help you get a feel for which of your tweets are getting the most engagement, and even attempts to calculate the “sentiment” of your Twitter followers toward your tweets.

Free external tools

There may still be questions you need answered that the tools above are not able to accommodate. Luckily, there are some free tools that can help even further. Here are a few to consider.

Klout

Klout uses an interesting set of criteria to determine what it refers to as a “Klout Score.” The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses variables on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus to measure what they call “True Reach,” “Amplification Probability,” and “Network Influence.”

True Reach is the size of your engaged audience and is based on those of your followers and friends who actively listen and react to your messages. Amplification Probability is the likelihood that your messages will generate actions (retweets, @messages, likes, and comments). Network Influence indicates how influential your engaged audience is. An overall score over 30 is considered good.

This scoring method can help you pinpoint specific areas where you may need improvement. For instance, the results depicted below demonstrate to me that I should take a close look at why my posts do not get as many “actions” as they should, especially since one of my goals is to increase virality.

There is a fair amount of controversy as to how accurate Klout scores are at measuring influence. But this controversy simply reinforces why the best approach to a successful measuring framework is to use a variety of tools, avoiding the temptation to rely on one “magic” number to measure social media success.

Google

Google still has about the best host of analytics tools at your disposal. Google Analytics can help you track and analyze website and social media visitors. Google Webmaster Tools can help you gain insight into how Google indexes your site, which search terms are used to find your site, errors on your site that may be keeping it from placing properly, and more. You can get advanced metrics on specific search terms with Google Trends, and Google Alerts can keep you informed when certain terms (like your name, your business name, your website name, or your book title) land high in search results.

socialmention

Real time search engines and analytics tools like socialmention can give you good insight into the kind of attention your posts and updates are getting. In addition, socialmention shows the reach, sentiment, and passion followers have for your name or brand. These search engines can also give you insight into the key terms that are typically associated with your brand.

PostRank

PostRank is one of the few paid services that still has a free option. Using PostRank, you can track not only your social media efforts, but engagement on specific pages of your website. It also allows you to track documents like PDFs, videos, or presentations. You can even use the service to analyze your RSS feeds.

You can get a lot of information on individuals updates or blog posts as shown below. Scrolling down this page reveals individual engagement activity, like tweets mentioning the post and more.

Paid services

There are a lot of social media metrics services popping up now-a-days, but with all of the free tools at your disposal, you won’t likely need them. Large companies, major brands, and PR firms running regular campaigns are typically the target market for such services.

If you do find yourself in need of a paid service, though, here are a few that have earned good reputations in PR and marketing circles:

• PostRank
• Radian 6
• JittterJam

When choosing a paid service, here are some questions to ask:

• Does it integrate your social accounts like Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter?
• Does it measure all of your social accounts?
• Does it measure your RSS feeds, website, and other documents?
• Does it measure interactions across other social sites?
• Does it show specific interactions?
• Does it measure engagement within your social accounts and on your website?
• Does it show “tags” or key terms used to find your content?
• Does it interface with Google Analytics or other analytics tools like Facebook Insights?

Stay informed, but trust your instincts

4Don’t get overwhelmed by all the “advice” out there. You know your business better than anyone, so don’t fall into the trap of following advice that does not apply to your goals. I am not suggesting you ignore what others are saying, but I do suggest choosing only a few good sources that can help you stay informed on the latest trends in social media.

Here are some resources to consider:

• Mashable
• ReadWriteWeb
• Socialmedia.biz
• Socialbrite
• SocialMediaToday

Slow and steady wins the race

I also recommend a slow and methodical approach. If you are building a consistent and optimized online presence that you periodically analyze and adjust to meet your goals, then you’re on the right track. Trust your instincts: Keep doing the things that are working, and ditch the things that aren’t.

This article is based on the author’s book, The Social Media Survival Guide, and was first published at Social Media Power.

The post 4 simple steps to measuring social media success appeared first on Inside Social Media.

One of the most packed sessions at this last’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco was “Measuring the Future: New Metrics for New Media,” a solo talk given by Margaret Francis, Vice President of Product at Lithium, one of our top 10 social media monitoring vendors.

“Social media is an effective way to create awareness of and interest in products and services,” she told the 400 onlookers. So, how do you do that?

Those of us who do social media consulting for brands bump up against this all the time: The client — properly, of course — wants metrics to gauge the success of their social media or social marketing efforts and to shift course when they’re not hitting their goals.

There are tons of things you could be measuring. David Berkowitz even listed 100 ways to measure social media, but that’s the way to get lost in the weeds.

Instead, Francis said, “Measure strategy, not stuff.” That is, focus entirely on what you’re trying to accomplish with your social media program or campaign and then identify the Key Performance Indicators that will tell you, over time, whether you’re getting there.

Four kinds of applied metrics

While companies want to talk about their social media ROI, they really need to focus on identifying KPIs that map to business objectives.

Francis laid out four kinds of applied metrics that you should be focusing on in your metrics program:

1. Brand perception: “It’s why Visa sponsors the Olympics and why Coca-Cola sponsors the Special Olympics,” she said. “It’s why you’re on Twitter.” It’s about maintaining or enhancing your brand’s reputation, perception and visibility. So you measure KPIs that inform factors like customer satisfaction score or likeliness to buy.
2. Marketing efficiency: You should be look at your website, optimize for SEO and study where your traffic is coming from: Twitter, Facebook, blogs. (Twitter, I’ll add, now drives more than 10 percent of the New York Times’ traffic. Facebook drives at least 13 percent of MSN’s and Yahoo’s traffic.) Study your analytics. “You’ve got to have a web analytics tracking system on your website,” she said. “It’s all about reach.” And that means you may need to track the “little ticky-tacky metrics” that add up to painting a fuller picture.
3. Revenue growth: It’s about leads and lead qualification as well as sales, so hone your marketing program to identify the people who will ultimately generate sales. So measure downloads, registrations, new subscribers and a host of other KPIs that will shine a light onto revenue growth patterns. (Francis didn’t talk about how to convert leads into customers, and it starts with using the right social media tools not only to identify them but to engage them in a high-value way.)
4. Support savings: Analysis of social media can provide a really cheap and interesting way to get market research done at a fraction of the cost of other methods.

The post Metrics advice: Think KPIs not ROI appeared first on Inside Social Media.

See our accompanying article on Socialbrite.org: How to measure your nonprofit’s social media success.

Is your business a social business? Companies that are making good use of social media should take the next step and measure the progress of their social media programs and campaigns. How do you know if you’re succeeding if you don’t have the numbers?

Today we’ll look at 10 ways that metrics can offer visibility into your business’s performance. You won’t want to chart all of these, but tracking a few well-chosen metrics — and incorporating the learnings into your business processes — can contribute to the bottom line.

Customer engagement

1Engagement can take place offline and online, on your site, on your social networks and in real-world face-to-face events. By letting customers participate in conversations about your brand, you can improve your business, your products and your levels of service. Ultimately, customer engagement is key to improving satisfaction and loyalty rates and revenue.

Metrics to track could include:

• Number of followers on Twitter, Facebook, et al.
• Number of retweets on Twitter
• Number of comments per blog post
• Number of external widgets embedded
• Invaluable assets as redistributors of content
• Customer reviews and ratings

Note: Such customer interaction can be invaluable in fostering a culture of community and in guiding product development. In addition, endorsements can be used as testimonials in marketing materials (with permission).

Sales & profits

2In the end, you business’s social media efforts need to not just generate customer goodwill — it should contribute to your company’s bottom line.

Metrics to keep an eye on include:

• Track sales from Google referrals
• Sales from paid search
• Sales as a result of social network mentions

Dell said it made $3 million selling products to its Twitter followers on the strength of coupons and discounts that other Twitterers gladly passed along virally as tipsters. And Blendtec’s Will It Blend? campaign on YouTube helped to drive a 500 percent increase in sales. Just don’t expect the needle to move right away.

Search marketing & rankings

3The importance of search engine optimization to your brand cannot be overstated: SEO & social media efforts should significantly increase your site’s visibility & performance in search results. It should also help you rank prominently for targeted items and increase your long-tail traffic.

• Identify and incorporate targeted keywords on major landing pages on your site.
• Strategically use keywords on social networks as well, such as Facebook.
• You can use links from Twitter or YouTube to claim valuable search rankings on your brand search terms.
• Tweets that rank for targeted keyword can lead to traffic from keywords that the site does not rank for.
• Whenever someone shares content from your site on a social site, you get a link back and a submission history.
• Try to convert one-time visitors from Digg, StumbleUpon and other social news sites into long-term members of your community.

Traffic & conversation reach

4Your business can produce the most gorgeous, well-manicured press releases in the world. But unless you get customers talking about your product or service and generating traffic to your website, microsite or social networks, you’re missing the boat.

• Raw traffic is important, but you’ll want to measure traffic from segmented audiences that you’re targeting.
• Chart the number of visitors to your social networks.

Brand sentiment

5The nature and purpose of public relations and external communications is changing from an industrial-era paradigm to one of facilitation and curation. Go with it — help create evangelists for your products or services among your most ardent fans. Word of mouth and the viral nature of sites like Twitter, Facebook and Digg can help shift your company’s key brand metrics.

You’ll need a more sophisticated set of metrics tools to gauge the following:

• Brand awareness, brand favorability, brand recall, propensity to buy, etc. (TV ads are measured in this way.)
• Positive brand associations via social media efforts can help drive clicks on paid search ads. Use a social media service to measure brand sentiment.

Public outreach

6The worlds of public relations, customer service and marketing are merging. Social media enables customers to interact with all channels within a company.

• Traditional metrics, such as column inches in newspapers and magazines, are becoming less relevant over time. Outreach to blogosphere & Twitterverse is becoming as important as outreach to media organizations. Consider creating a social media newsroom that offers bloggers and news organizations a rich set of multimedia, bulleted takeaways and quotes from key participants. Then track the number of mentions on social sites by using the bit.ly url shortener.

Lead generation

7Social media is becoming a funnel for lead generation. A number of tools now let you track business prospects through sophisticated filtering mechanisms.

• Use LinkedIn to connect with potential business partners and clients, and chart the rate of invitations accepted and follow-up communications acted upon. See which kinds of messaging are resonating.
• Here’s an opportunity for your internal teams to work together to optimize your site for keywords and key phrases. It’s always better when potential customers come to you.

Customer retention

8We’re moving into an age of optimization and retention. Watch your retention rates as you start participating in social media. Over time, if your team uses social media intelligently, they should rise.

• Zappos, which uses Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube for its social media efforts, has exceeded $1 billion in sales. Some 75 percent of its orders are repeat customers. Make sure you monitor your repeat customers and shower them with love.

Cost savings

9In this age of cost-cutting, companies are looking to apply savings wherever they can. Cisco saved $250,000 by using social media rather than traditional PR and marketing to roll out its Data Center project.

• Crowdsourcing has become an increasingly popular way for businesses to leverage customers and outside parties for savings. Consider how cost reductions can be applied in a way that benefits the bottom line while not infringing on worker rights or jeopardizing health and environmental standards. Then measure how each initiative contributes to cost containment.

Employee recruitment

10The brightest young minds coming into the workplace today live, breathe and understand social media. Show them that you’re a genuine social business and not just another company hunkering down in the wake of the social media revolution.

• Measure incoming employees’ sentiment about your company. What are they saying? What attracted them?
• Measure exiting employees’ sentiment. Assign someone from human relations, with no stake in the matter, to conduct exit interviews. Assess their feedback — and take it to heart.

These are 10 ideas, but it’s not a complete list. List your ideas in the comments below.

The post 10 ways to measure social media for business appeared first on Inside Social Media.