You're spending serious time and money on social media, but are you measuring your return on investment? If not, how do you know it's even working? By measuring these 5 metrics, you will be well on your way to getting an accurate representation of your ROI.
Referring Sites (or where your clicks come from)
This metric tells you which percent of your clicks came from which social networks and is more useful than you might think. By measuring where the majority of your clicks are coming from, you can determine where you should be spending more or less time. For instance, if only 2% of your clicks come from Twitter but 65% come from Facebook, then you know that your audience is more present on Facebook and you should spend more time there. There are some social media management dashboards out there that track this metric, but if you sign up for a bit.ly account, you will be able to track it there.
Comments
Comments may sound like an obvious one, but are you using a social media monitoring tool that can provide you with a chart that represents comments over time? If you monitor your comments over time, you can see which topics got your audience talking and continue to post about those topics. If you have a Facebook Business Page and monitor your Insights, you can find this metric in the "Interactions" portion of your Insights page.
Klout
This metric probably deserves an entire blog post for itself but I will try to be brief and highlight the key things you should be paying attention to. Klout summarizes your Klout score as "The Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage you influence others. The Klout Score uses data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare in order to measure:
How many people you influence (True Reach)
How much you influence them (Amplification)
How influential they are (Network Score)"
Your Klout score will be on a scale of 1 to 100. Don't worry if your Klout score is low, you should view this as a work in progress and something that you are constantly striving to improve upon.
Your Klout score is broken down into True Reach, Amplification, and Network Score. These are used to determine your Klout score.
Your True Reach is the number of people that you influence. Klout's True Reach count focuses on people who act on your content by responding to it or sharing it.
Your Amplification is how much you influence people. Klout explains this on their site, "When you post a message, how many people respond to it or spread it further? If people often act upon your content you have a high Amplification score".
Your Network Score indicated the influence of the people within your True Reach. Klout explains, "How often do top Influencers share and respond to your content? When they do so, they are increasing your Network Score".
Sentiment
Since I just complicated your life with that really long explanation of Klout, I'll keep this one brief. Sentiment is simply whether people are saying positive, negative or indifferent things about your brand. There are several tools that can be used to measure this, but make sure that they measure sentiment for each individual message so that you can address negative comments. An overall sentiment score is useless if you can't take action to improve it.
Mentions by Source
If you are using a tool to track mentions of your brand, make sure it measures mentions of your keyword/brand by source. If you aren't using such a tool, keep in mind that listening is a big part of social media and you should really try to do this. Mentions by Source will tell you where people are talking about you, which gives you the perfect segue into the conversation. For instance, people may be asking their friends questions about your brand on Twitter; you could chime in and help answer them. If this metric is measured correctly, it will tell you what percent of your mentions are coming from blogs as well as social media. You then should be able to view each mention and see the sentiment.
If you start measuring these 5 metrics, you should have an idea of your return on investment and whether you are spending your time and money wisely. By ignoring these simple metrics and continuing your social media strategy blindly, you are just throwing away your time and money. Do yourself a favor and start by finding a tool to help you monitor these metrics today.