Social Media, like so many other marketing activities is often criticized for its lack of real measures. “How do I know its working?”, “How do I measure ROI?” good questions to ask of any program, but with Social Media being so new to so many, how to measure ROI is still open for debate.

One area that can be measured and tracked over time and therefore show results is conversation. There are some great tools out there that will help with this process. Some are free, some available on a subscription basis, depending on your budget you can definitely find a tool to fit it. What is missing from all of these is the metrics that go beyond the counting.

While all of these methods will show you how many people have mentioned you, your brand, your product in a given timeframe and on given platforms, be they blogs, twitter, youtube or any of the other popular sites, what they miss is the importance of those mentions. Context is everything. Just because you find a blog that talks about nothing other than your brand, this doesn’t mean that anyone is reading it. So how important is it to you really?

All the marketing departments I have contact with have one thing in common, whether they are Fortune 500’s or startups, not enough resources. So focusing those resources on actionable items is paramount. If your tool shows that you have had 400 mentions in the Social Media world, are you really equipped to cope with responding to all of those? Probably not, in reality you have to decide how to focus, the simplest way to do that is to look at the reach of those mentions.

On platforms like Twitter this is fairly easy to achieve – a rough guide to a Twitter users reach is the number of followers they have. This isnt an absolute measure of reach but it is certainly a good starting point. With blogs it becomes a little harder, while there are numerous sites that will provide you with “webstats” for blogs they really only work well on unique domains, for example getting an accurate measure of traffic for a blogspot blog can be challenging, but that doesnt mean that because a blog resides on a free blog host it doesnt have a long reach.

Monitoring these results, and seeing how they change over time is a very good way of determining your impact on the world of Social Media. As the conversations about your organization, brand or product moves from low traffic sites to higher traffic sites so you can determine that those with a broader reach are talking about you and therefore more people are seeing your brand mentioned. Monitoring will also help to ensure that these mentions are for the right reasons.

What are you measuring in your Social Media activity?

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