Measuring Social Media

Hat tip to Mauricio for pointing me in the direction of this little gem!

Social Media isn’t easy to measure and client seem to be obsessed with figures which are often hard to get. But how do we measure social media?

Measuring Social Media Qualitatively – clients often forget the importance of loyalty, trust, satisfaction and brand perception. I recently managed a Twitter feed on behalf of a public sector client where Twitter followers thought it was a bot posting twitter updates. I started engaging with them and their perception of the client immediately became positive and our Twitter follower base started growing organically as a result.

Measuring Social Media Quantitatively – Social Media is hard to measure however there are a number of tools available to measure the impact of Social Media activity:
- Google Analytics: as soon as your social media campaign kicks off, you should make sure that Google Analytics is fully operational and get to know your audience: where do they come from (country of origin), which browser do they use, track they journey on your site, how much time do they spend reading certain articles etc.
- Number of friends: keep track of your number of friends, comments on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or the views of a photo/video on Flickr, YouTube week after week to demonstrate the progression of the social Media activity over a period of time
- Create embeddable RSS WidgetBox widgets to amplify WOM and drive traffic to your client’s website
- Track the performance of your URLs with bit.ly

These are some of the measures I currently use. Are there any other tools that you feel should be included in this list?