Social Media is certainly becoming a buzz word in many companies. But how can we measure return on investment (ROI)? It certainly isn’t simple. There are many ways being touted to track social media but there is no obvious “perfect” solution. It isn’t like a simple email campaign where you can measure the number of emails sent out, the number opened and the conversions that resulted. Most of what happens in social media is securely hidden from view by a login. The outcomes are often much more fuzzy things like developing “brand awareness” etc. The things that appropriate for your company will be specific to your current situation.

So what can we measure? To start measuring Social Media ROI you need to define your own set of metrics relevent to your particular context. What do you value as a measure? Could you measure the number of retweets a blog post get? Number of views of a video? Number of comments? Would it be relevant to define a metric based on comment length? By setting up a system you can start measuring your outcomes to establish what is working for you.

It is important to realise that simply having a large number of followers/friend/subscribers does not actually mean anything in terms of engagement. You need to look a whole lot deeper than this to understand what is really going on. The things you measure should aim to identify the people that are actually hearing what you say and are actively engaged in building community themselves.

So where are the conversations relevant to your brand happening on the internet? This is where you need to be. These niche areas often have fewer people but they are often highly focused and engagement levels are high. The best way to find such relevant conversation is to use social media monitoring software.

Your company can make a real difference to the level of engagement in their brand by the way they behave on social networks. If you simply use the network as a way to advertise then you are loosing a lot of the value of social media. Social means participating in social channel, by sharing opinion and giving people a reason to interact with you. A company that engages with personality and a level of giving will have a much higher level of engagement from others.

At a higher level you also need to set up a social media strategy with clear objectives. This helps not only justify your activity in the long term but also helps you work out what your logical next steps should be.. SociaLNK can help you develop metrics and strategies to help you understand your own Social Media ROI.

Email has been used to do targeted marketing for many years. However the common perception is that it is past is sell by date as a way to communicate with customers. Too many emails end straight in the bin. In response to this some companies are starting to use email in much more positive social networking ways. One example I like is from LinkedIN who update me on a monthly basis as to the changes the people in my network have made to their sites. I always read this and usually go and check out what they have been up to. This is useful information for me.

I think the thing to learn from this example is that LinkedIN have taken their data and analysed what might be of value to me. They are not pushing to sell anything in these emails they are simply touching base and building engagement. This is the one piece of targeted email that does not go straight in the bin for me.

In the past a popular way to encourage sharing of an email has been to use “forward to a friend”. However a recent study shows that “Share to Social” (S2S) links result in a much higher increase in reach – as much as 24%. These sharing tools are available as buttons and have been around on blogs and websites for around 3 years. Posting these links within emails is a relatively new development – but it clearly makes sense. At SociaLnk we are constantly on the lookout for new trends like this!

However before you start adding huge numbers of buttons to your emails it is worth identifying which social networks your customers might use. Monitoring your customers is easier than you might think and the feedback is invaluable. Again this is an area we know a great deal about.

If you do decide to go ahead and add some buttons it is also worth providing space for a little education about how to share as this is a new phenomena for many customers. A simple “what is this?” button giving them appropriate instructions about how to use the buttons and why it might be useful to share will probably gain you brownie points.

What are your views on the mix of social media and email? Have you had good or bad experiences? Do share!