Monitoring and Measuring Your Social Media

Okay, so you have decided to utilize various social media sites to inform your customers and create exposure to your company's products and services. You might be thinking...now what?

It is great that you have taken a dive into this multi-million dollar industry, but are you tracking the progress & success of your social media sites? Many companies struggle in justifying the amount of money used to employ and maintain social media sites. One of the main reasons for this struggle is that companies do not know what they are looking for. Below are 5 factors to look for when measuring your social media:

• Views - How many people have visited your site? Whether it's a blog, Facebook page, or Youtube video, you can track how much traffic your site created. This is the gross number of exposure to your content.
• Buzz - This measures the "chatter" about your brand or company on the internet. Some of the key metrics of "chatter" are comments on video, content, or pictures, tweets, and retweets. 
• Virality - How quickly your content spreads and is shared through different social media sites. This takes into account the gross number of views and the span of time in which the views occurred.  
• Connections - These are the people that are interested in your brand and come forward to make a relationship. Connections can come in many forms, such as following your brand on twitter, becoming friends or 'liking' you on Facebook, or subscribing to your blog or Youtube channel.
• Company Engagements - Social media is not one sided. As a company, you have to be involved in other people's sites and content. You have to create your own buzz by being seen as knowledgeable and trustworthy. You can accomplish this by posting on other sites, retweeting, 'liking' on Facebook, and commenting on external and internal blogs.

You can also measure social media referrals and show your social media efforts by using web analytics tools. Web analytics can provide measurements that will help you track ROI and justify the resources used for your social media efforts. Some of the better monitors on the market are Social mentions, Google Alerts, Radian6, Tweetdeck,  and Viralheat. At the end of the day, metrics need to be provided to show the value that social media marketing efforts offer your company.