In my last post, I touched on the concept of measuring ROI on Social Media campaigns. I say ‘concept’ because most professionals aren’t actually doing it!

Before launching a Social Media campaign, I’d highly recommend taking a pulse of where you are currently:

1. Make a note of the obvious numbers (number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Digg links, Delicious bookmarks, and referrals from social media sites, plus existing website traffic).
2. Make a note of the less obvious benchmarks (such as SEO rankings and referrals, customer satisfaction scores and other business data).
3. Make a note of ROI benchmarks. How much are you paying to acquire customers via other marketing channels? How vast is that advertising budget, and how is it being split up? And what proportion is being directed into channels that you cannot accurately measure?

Determining a baseline at this stage will allow you to, at a quick glance (and provided you are not running any other marketing campaigns), determine the overall effectiveness of your social media campaign.

Standard Engagement Metrics

Most Social Media campaigns will drive traffic to a website. Here are some basic ‘engagement’ or ‘interaction’ metrics you will want to be measuring :

• Unique visitors
• Page views per visitor
• Time spent on site
• Total time spent per user
• Frequency of visits
• Depth of visit
• Conversions

If you don’t have a Google Analytics account, get one. If you have one, use it! It should become your Analytical BFF. AND did you know that there is a social media plugin for Google Analytics called Social Media Metrics?

If you’re also running a paid search campaign, you should be monitoring the standard search metrics:
– Clicks
– Impressions
– Click through rate (CTR)
– Conversion rates
– Revenue, etc.

Google Adwords, or your paid search marketing team should be able to provide you with these metrics.

This is just the start. In the next post, we’ll be taking a deeper look at reading and measuring Social Media Metrics.