The 3 golden metrics of social media success

Social media marketing has matured to the point where brands are demanding demonstrable ROI. It’ll no longer suffice to set up a Facebook account or Twitter profile to simply ‘see what happens’. And quite rightly so. But unlike the online advertising industry, which has some standardised metrics in place, social media measurement systems remain nascent.

Social marketing yields a mine of data which agencies and large brands can measure accurately with analytics software. But smaller companies without access to in-depth metrics – fear not. By employing these three simple, key metrics, you can start to establish the vital statistics of your social media programme:

1. Total online community size

Measure the total active size of your social CRM – covering your presence on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr and any managed blogs. You’re looking for steady growth over time to establish whether or not you’re offering value to your communities.

2. Monthly referred social traffic to site

This doesn’t necessarily require complex social content sharing tools. Start simple, and drill down to the total unique site traffic coming to your website from links shared through blogs, forums and major social networks. Use your preferred website analytics tool, be it Omniture, WebTrends or Google Analytics, and produce month-on-month graphs to show trends.

3. Social monthly impressions

It’s not a perfect science, but estimating your social monthly impressions will offer some indication of your brand’s reach in social media. If you can’t stretch to one of the many social media monitoring tools available, use Google Alerts to get regular digests of brand mentions, covering blogs, news sites and the major social networks.

While they can’t claim to proffer in-depth or complex analysis, the golden 3 (courtesy of searchenginewatch.com) present a basic measurement programme for any brand’s core social media efforts.