With all aspects of marketing the return on investment (ROI) is key and social media marketing is no exception. There are no hard and fast rules of what to measure and over time you will create your own success metrics. Measuring social media will also provide you invaluable insight into where traffic is coming from and what the most popular networks, blogs and forums are allowing you to focus your efforts on where to engage in conversation.
Here are some tools to get you started on measuring social media:
• Set up Google Alerts. Google Alerts are free email updates from Google search results about any topic you’re interested in tracking. Anytime Google adds something to its index that mentions the terms you are tracking you will receive an immediate email notification with a link to that item. Alerts can be set up for web, blog, news, video, or group searches. This could include:
o Your keywords/phrases
o Your competitors
• Review the results in your web analytics data. You could use Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that provides detailed and very useful information about your website traffic and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. When you run social media campaigns, you can attach tracking tags to those campaigns so that we can properly monitor them in Google Analytics. You will also know which sites are sending traffic to your site.
• Search Twitter. You currently can search Twitter for real-time results. One easy way to monitor conversations about your company is to search for your company’s name. You can also use Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic to save searches and monitor in real-time whenever someone uses a specific word or phrase in a tweet.
• Use BackType, which is a real-time search engine that indexes online conversations in thousands of blogs and social networks. This will allow you to keep up-to-date with conversations in blogs and respond to posts about your business