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Of all the questions I’ve fielded over the past year about Social Media, the most commonly asked one is, “How can I measure my activities on the social web to ensure they add value to my business?”  Some argue that social media is too difficult to measure and others who point out that while the metrics are imperfect, they are still performance indicators. I believe that quantitative measures only paint a small part of the social media picture and that you need qualitative measures to complete it.

Where to Begin? A simple way to start assessing your brand presence is to repeat the same methodology you use on internet search engines. Using your brand name and targeted keyword list, conduct searches on the social media sites to see how you rank. Here are a few examples of how social sites and tools can be used to measure activities:

• DIGG or Delicious: Search for your company, product or service and see how many people have bookmarked it, when they did, and what comments have been posted.
• Facebook Page insights offer a look at the amount of visitors to your page, “likes”, interactions, and discussions on your wall. Look at weekly reports to gauge the level of engagement here.
• Hootsuite View stats on message popularity, clicks, top referrers by region, mentions of your brand, and thanks to the latest upgrade, link your Google Analytics account to track conversion to sales and lead generation on one screen.
• Technorati: If you have a blog, monitor the authority score to measure the number of blogs linking to yours, fans, and your blog’s rank. Are the blogs linking to yours ones that your target audience reads and respects?
• Twitter: Monitor the chatter to catch bug reports, complaints, and positive buzz as it pops up.  You can plug your search terms into Twitter and monitor your results before, during, and at the end of a campaign. Save your searches. Monitor how many followers you have as a predictor for the potential reach of your messages/posts.

Assess the nature of the sentiment. Sentiment, otherwise known as how someone feels about your brand, can be positive, negative or neutral. Is the first page of search results on Google or the social sites filled with complaints or compliments? Is there some kind of FUD out there that you need to tend to? Or brand advocates that you should be thanking?

Create alerts. You can create a Google alert for a specific term, such as your company name. Be sure to choose the option for “All” so you receive notices from news, blogs, web, video, and groups. You’ll be notified when your term is found via email.

Don’t neglect Home Base. Your web site is the place where you should be assessing not only where you are getting referral traffic from, (social sites) but how users are interacting with your site by using Google Analytics. Are visitors:

• Leaving quickly or staying for a long time
• Rating the page or items on it
• Commenting, Tagging or Bookmarking content  
• Sharing or Linking to content
• Doing something new based on it (e.g. making a purchase)

If you want to track shares and bookmarks, make sharing easy by posting free ShareThis or AddThis Social Bookmarking buttons on the content areas of your site. Both options provide insightful data in easy to digest reports.

View the caliber of the interaction.  Are people just doing quick drive-bys, or do you have repeat visitors? What types of posts/topics sparked discussion on your blog? Look for any patterns here to tweak your messaging.  

One Stop Shopping. If you need a deeper scan of the social web and prefer your data all in one place, here are some suggested monitoring tools to help you achieve your goal:

• Socialmention (free)
• Buzzient (paid)
• Trackur (www.trackur.com)(paid & free)
• Radian6 (paid)
• Alterians’ SM2 (paid)

Putting it All Together

Use the information you find wisely and store it in a database for reporting purposes. By focusing on the qualitative and quantitative measures, you’re going to generate some great questions for your next assessment. By paying attention to what works on the social web and discovering why, you’ll gain the know-how that empowers you to delve deeper into social media to build on your social presence to drive value for your business.  

Agree or disagree, “Adding value to your business” doesn’t have to mean that the activities have to translate into pure monetary gains. There is a lot to be said for brand awareness, increase in word of mouth marketing and overall market insight as well. Be prepared—engaging on the social web opens you up to the chance to gain insight—both good and bad– into your business that you never had before.

Here’s to Being Social, Denise

Denise Meyer is Solutions Marketing Manager and resident Social Media Guru at Interactive Intelligence You can follow her on Twitter at @DeniseMichelle

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