It's hard to assess the ROI of Social Media Marketing but at least we can measure the efforts.
With a good organization, it can be measured from day one and connect the actions with their results.
We can obtain a huge amount of data, so we must first establish the goals for our actions then set appropriate metrics for measuring success in achieving the objectives.
Traffic Activity: It happens to be the most important variable to consider.
It tries to analyze in an old fashioned way the activity that the community is involved, for instance in a blog the activity is determined by traffic, page views, unique visitors, bounce rates, reader stayed time, etc.
Fans Size: Getting followers on Twitter or having Facebook fans is relatively easy.
But it is hard to calculate the return.
Influence and references: It is a essential metric when looking for people talking about us which in turn will save us some money from traditional advertising.
It means to consider how much our "fans" appreciate the content provided through the channels set, how many re-tweets or mentions in blogs and social networks we have or how many users click on the links we published.
Interactions: It's the dialogue (energy and activity) we have with members of the community, as well as that maintained between them.
Comments (e.
g.
on a forum, on our blog or in our fan pages), mentions on Twitter...
People talk and interact.
The community is alive.
This structure is simple and flexible, but be careful, we can get as many back links from the same site as it seems we are very influential, when the truth might be we are only for a few.
In general, what matters is to define some key metrics, and weighted over objectives.
It is advisable to consider these four areas, and don't leave any aside.
Size matters even more than what we have said before, but if we only focus on size, we are wrong as well as if we pay no attention to it.
Measuring variables are useful, but we are far away from having reliable tools and specially for free.