Simple Ways To Measure Your Social Media Efforts

[ChristineG]

There have always been pretty straightforward methods for business owners to calculate their marketing ROI.

Along comes social media marketing and suddenly measuring this is not so cut and dry. I am asked a lot how you can tell whether the time you've spent on social media activities is really making a difference. Here are some easy (and free) ways to gauge your efforts:

Profile engagement
Blog comments
Blog subscribers
E-zine subscribers
Website metrics
Social bookmarking/social news
Followers and friends
Links from other blogs
Products/services sold

So, it comes down to: Are you findable? Are you being seen as an expert? Do people want to find out more about what it is you do?

You may not be able to equate your interactions to dollars now, but you are planting seeds which can have big payoffs later on. And that makes social media well worth most small business owners' time.

You can read the full article here: Simple Ways to Measure Your Social Media Efforts

[Tom Lindstrom]

Good points.With so many (hundreds) of social media sites it´s impossible to participate in all of them.Therefore, I have concentrated on a few big ones in my niche that I try to use every day (StumbleUpon, Twitter and Mixx).It takes time to build authority online but when it is done right by submitting mostly other peoples good content and sometimes your own, people start to recognize you and you will get traffic over time.

[david1981]

Many social media campaigns fail because the marketer goes in with the wrong objectives.

I'm not saying that you can't use social media for link building / SEO but it should usually be a secondary objective. The links are generally no-follow and the sites themselves are adamant about weeding out spam.

Social media is a great way to build traffic and brand recognition. It can also be effectively used as one part of a long-term SEO strategy. The more you get noticed on the major social networks, the more likely you are to see organic links popping up here and there.

[OrlandoSEO]

David makes a really awesome point. Unfortunately most SEO companies push social media as link building tool, just like forum posting. He is absolutely right about seo being the secondary objective. First objectives should be connecting with the target audience in a conversation in a bi directional manner instead of just talking at them, and building authority so that you have the weight you need when it comes time to suggest something.