Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
By Albert Einstein

Social media definitely belongs to the latter part of the above statement. How else shall we determine that our social media marketing strategy giving results?

By measuring social media parameters we can get valuable information about our customers that we didn’t have before, communicate with them and make them more familiar with our products/services, articles etc., see which contents interest them the most, what they like and dislike, gain information on new trends.  This is very important in planning our future activities and goals.

But can social media be measured and how ? What, actually, to measure?, Which techniques to use?

Let’s go from the beginning.

There’s no doubt,  social media can be measured, but there is no unique answer about the measuring strategy. It should be adjusted to concrete case and can include various measurements.

We must point out that  results of your social media campaign will not show up immediately. It takes time.

The next question is what to measure.

There are many parameters to be measured to get the complete picture on the success of our social media marketing strategy.

One of the suggestions is ROI (Return On Investment).

Then, in the case you have a blog, you can use web analytic reports  from which  you can get valuable information on the most popular content on your blog or about the visitors (how long they were on that particular page, where they came from etc.).

You can also monitor the number of visitors who are actually interacting with your content. and use Social Bookmarking,  subscribe to a RSS feed.

If you have your profile on e.g. Facebook or Twitter you can analyse the number of friends that you have, total profile visits.

Some of the parameters are overall traffic increases, where the traffic is coming from,  E-mail subscribers, amount of blog comments.

From intangible parameters, which are much more difficult to be measured, there is :number of leads, information you gain from interacting with your users, positive brand image.

Those are some of the parameters that should be measured, but the most important is to find your own strategy  depending on the goals you want to achieve with your social media marketing strategy.

It can include monitoring data, web site analytic data and manual data.

What are the tools for measurement?

Some of free tools available are: Google Alerts Social Mention ,Google Insights for Search,
Keotag, Klout, Monitter, Omgili, Quarkbase.
Pricing tools are e.g.:Trackur, PostRank Analytics

In measuring social media crucial is to find the best combination of parametres to measure and tools to apply in your  case. Only then you get  the full informations on the results of your social media marketing campaign. Metrics for any communication medium is a challenge so social media is no different.

It is crucial to understand that social media metrics need to be a combination of both tangible and intangible metrics and focusing on one over the other would not the right way to look at it.