One of the biggest question we recieve from clients and potential clients is along the lines of “How do we measure our ROI” or “How do we know the campaign is working?”  This is definitely the largest gap in social media marketing right now.  However with a little bit of ingenuity you can pull some very strong numbers to present to clients.

First of all keep track of everything you do.  Keep a running tally with a piece of paper and pencil if you have to.  Every time you twitter about the campaign you’re working on, every friend request you send out, every successful friend added, every comment you leave on someone’s blog, every time you socially bookmark, every comment left on your blog - mark them all down.  This will give you a daily rundown of what you’re actually accomplishing in the campaign.  Clients love numbers like this.  At the end of the week send out a weekly review and just state what was accomplished during the week.  “This week we added 50 friends to Facebook, 125 to MySpace, received 100 comments on our blog, syndicated 15 blog posts to 50 different sites.”  Clients love to see that you’re accomplishing things.

That takes care of the day to day reporting but you can definitely expand on that.  When you’re commenting on other peoples blogs use a tool like CoComment to record every where you’re posting about yourself.  At the end of the week take a look at the sites you’re primarily leaving the comments on.  Pull out the top 50 or so sites and research them.  Gather their Alexa rating, Google PageRank, and use blog ranking services like Technorati and Wikio to figure out which are the most useful to your campaign… and then let the client know that.

Gathering metrics from social sites is a bit more straight forward.  Number of friends added, number of blogs/bulletins posted, profile views, unsolicited friend request are all metrics that clients like to hear.

Video site metrics should include the obvious number of views but also should go a bit deeper and include number of comments on videos, number of embeds, number of comments on those embeds and number of favorites of the video.

So as you can see the numbers are out there to report on.  Unfortunately it’s not quite as easy as looking at your payperclick account or reviewing your site analytics.  What do you use to monitor social marketing campaigns?

Tags: business social networking, metrics, social media campaigns, Social Media Marketing, web-metrics

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 7:29 am and is filed under Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.