Once you’ve established what you want to accomplish with your social media marketing efforts, it’s time to get a measuring system in place. This will let you know when you reach (or don’t reach) those objectives. 

While you should expect some trial and error when putting your measurement strategy together, the ultimate payoff will be worth it. Over time you should see correlations between social media and growth in your businesses’ revenue, web traffic, and general visibility.

Be sure to build a simple dashboard to track and update your social media metrics every week or every month. This will help you monitor trends and set new goals, based on what’s working. If stuff isn’t moving in the right direction, monitoring the right metrics gives you a chance to mix it up and try new things.

There are six metrics found to be highly effective in determining social media success:

1. Referring Traffic from Social

Set up goals based on the actions you want your visitors to complete (retweet, share, click-through, etc.). This should boost traffic to your website.

2. Conversions from Social

Set up conversion goals and measure the source. Is the referral traffic coming from social converting? If the answer is no, switch up your content strategy so you are attracting folks that meet your prospective customer profile.

3. Share of Voice

This refers to the number of conversations that are happening about your company vs. your competitors/market. There’s a simple formula to calculate this metric:

Share of Voice = Your Mentions / (Total Mentions for Competitive Companies/Brands) 

4. Share of Conversation

This is similar to the Share of Voice metric, but instead takes a look at the more specific topical conversations around your business or brand vs. the market.

5. Sentiment

Although an imperfect science, paying attention to the human element is a very useful measure of success. Go through your mentions manually and tag them as “positive,” “neutral” or “negative.” Add up the totals and measure over time to see if the number of “positives” go up and the “negatives” go down.

6. Pipeline Contribution

Once you define what social success means for your business (shares, Likes, Tweets, form completes), you can determine how social touches like these contribute to pipeline creation.

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