Measuring the effectiveness of social media campaigns has been quite a hot topic over the last few years. One of the biggest objections business leaders make about the medium is the difficulty to measure success. Is that really the case?

Using analytics and other measurements, we can get a solid idea of what social media is (or isn’t) doing for our brand. What you choose to measure is up to you, but should always reflect an analysis of your main business objective(s). Here are 50 for you to start thinking about:

Website/Blog

  1. Website traffic
  2. Unique visitors (How many different people visited?)
  3. Total page views
  4. Subscribers (email & RSS)
  5. Average time spent per visit
  6. Click-through rate
  7. Bounce rate (What % of visitors leave the website after viewing the first page?)
  8. Number of times a post was shared via social media
  9. Blog comments
  10. Average time you spend per post

Email

  1. Total subscribers
  2. Open rate (Of those who received the email, how many opened it?)
  3. Bounce rate (Of the sent emails, how many were returned as undeliverable?)
  4. Click-through rate (Of the opened emails, how many people clicked a link?)
  5. Unsubscribe rate
  6. Open rate by day (What day of the week results in the highest open rate?)
  7. Conversion rate (subscribe, purchase, download, etc.)

Facebook

  1. Total fans
  2. Total impressions (How many people viewed the post in the news feed or wall?)
  3. Monthly Active Users (How many people interacted with out brand in the last 30 days?)
  4. Engagement by post category (Do people respond most to links? Videos? Pictures? Questions? )
  5. Engagement by time of day/day of week
  6. Conversion rate (Of those who view our page, how many of them choose to “like” it?)
  7. Fan demographics (Are we reaching our target audience?)
  8. Unique page views (How many different people viewed our page?)
  9. Views, clicks, and engagement for different tabs

Twitter

  1. Total followers
  2. Number of times listed
  3. Total brand mentions
  4. Sentiment (Are people talking positively or negatively about my brand?)
  5. @Reply ratio (What percent of my tweets are @replies vs. regular tweets?)
  6. Profile views
  7. Number of clicks per tweet
  8. Total retweets
  9. Engagement by time of day/day of week
  10. Target analysis (What percent of interactions are from a specific target?)

Other networks

  1. Total Foursquare check-ins
  2. Foursquare special/promotion results
  3. Foursquare Mayor (Who is it and what can we do for them?)
  4. Total YouTube video views
  5. YouTube comments/video responses
  6. YouTube subscribers
  7. LinkedIn group members
  8. LinkedIn interactions (+ how many resulted in in-person communication?)

Return on Investment

  1. Correlations (between sales & engagement)
  2. Net new customers
  3. Reduction in overhead costs (customer service, communication, marketing, other)
  4. Promotional code redemptions
  5. Leads generated (& conversion rate)
  6. Dollars spent by the social customer (vs. non-social)

Is it a good idea to measure all of the above? Certainly not. Doing so would result in a severe lack of focus and efficiency. At the same time, it is not meant to be a conclusive list. My goal is to give you an idea of how to think and how to get started in the space. If you haven’t measured anything up to this point, pick just 2-3 key measurements from each platform and start there.  And smile, because you now have a response to the question “How do you measure all this stuff?”

What are your thoughts in the area of measurement? Do you feel that social media is gaining ground as a universally accepted business tool?

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Today’s guest post is brought to you by Garrett Ira (@GarrettIra). Garrett teams up with small businesses and non-profit organizations to improve marketing programs and implement new media communications. Connect with him on his fan page (www.facebook.com/barefootSM) or check out his blog at Barefoot Social Media (www.barefootsocialmedia.com).