How Do You Measure Your Social Media Efforts?

Some of our recent bloggers have addressed the challenges and opportunities presented by social media. But when all is said and done, how do we know our efforts are making a difference? How do we know we're actually reaching anyone? How do we set goals for increasing our reach and impact if we don't know where we stand now? That's just one of the discussions we've had around the office.

If you have a company or association Web site, chances are that you're tracking its Web statistics, whether through Google Analytics, another Web tracking service or a customized application. These Web metrics, if monitored frequently, can help you determine the number of visitors coming to your site, how they're getting there, how long they're staying, where they go once on your site and other trends.

These are valuable stats - but how do they transfer to the world of social media, where interactivity is key?

I'm not sure anyone has the answer just yet (and if you do - please share!), but here's one way to go about it.

1. Start today. Even if you're just getting started with Facebook or Twitter, now's the time to start tracking. Getting a baseline helps you set goals for the future and measure whether you've been able to accomplish these goals.
2. Determine the key stats or metrics for your social media strategy. If you only have a presence on one social media site, this should be pretty simple. But in the case of many of our clients, we're measuring across multiple sites - Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. In my opinion, the more stats the better - as these can help give you a clear overall picture of your social media efforts.
3. Create a spreadsheet for these metrics. It may sound simplistic, but for one of our clients, we created a basic Excel spreadsheet with each metric as a column header. For example, on Twitter, we look at not only the number of followers but also the average number of Tweets per month. On our blogs, we look at subscribers and the number of blog posts and comments per month. This helps us, as staff, stay on top of our goals in terms of posting and content as well as measure whether these efforts are reaching others outside our organization. I prefer to keep all of our sites on one spreadsheet so that you can easily compare and contrast the effectiveness of different social media sites. For example, if we've had a huge increase in our Twitter followers but our Facebook page is stagnant, it might be a sign that we need to devote a bit more time in this area.
4. Set goals and track your results frequently. Stats are only helpful if you take the time to record and review them. We update our stats monthly - but you'll need to figure out what works for your organization.

As I said, this is just one way to go about it -- and who knows how we might tweak this strategy in the future. Have an idea that's working for your association? Let us know!