Phil Lauterjung

It seems as though I come across an article every day that questions the use of Social Media as a legitimate tactic to use in business.  The big question is can Social Media be measured?  Can you get an ROI from Social Media?

The best answer that I can think of is – it depends.  Kind of a weasely answer, but bear with me for a moment.  There are currently over 350 million people on Facebook and nearly 50 million on LinkedIn.  There are also tens of millions on Twitter, but that seems to be a more difficult number to pin down.  My point is that there are very large numbers of people using these communities to talk about what matters to them.  Some of them might be your customers or prospective customers.

The question you need to answer is who among your customers and prospects are part of these communities?  If they aren’t using these venues then don’t bother trying to reach people that aren’t there.  Simple, huh?  Well, not so fast.  Have you asked your customers yet?  Have you run some basic search parameters on any of those sites I mentioned to find out?  Don’t dismiss these communities until you are sure that your audience isn’t there.

Once you find out that they are involved in these Social Media communities, you still need to develop a plan, with objectives, for reaching them.  I covered some of this in my series on Integrated Lead Generation that you can review from the topics on the sidebar to the right.  But, beware of falling into the trap of simply measuring the number of hits you get on your website.  Remember that HITS can also be an acronym for How Idiots Track Success.  You need more measurement than that.  How about how much do sales increase over a period of time?

Once you have developed your plan and start implementing it you need to know how effective it is.  Unfortunately that isn’t always easy.  I have seen hundreds of “tools” for monitoring Twitter and most of them fall very short of meaningful information.  Twitter seems to be the most difficult to measure.  Thankfully, Avinash Kaushik who writes the Occam’s Razor blog recently posted a list of his favorite tools for analyzing Twitter campaigns.  Avinash is one of the smartest people I know in the area of web analytics.  The tools he suggests will give you very meaningful insights.

Another resource worth referring you to is a recent post from Chris Brogan called Measuring Social Media Marketing.  Chris is a well-respected blogger, but also gives out solid and helpful information that you can use in your business.  His suggestions for measuring social media are benchmarks that he uses in his own business when working with his clients.  They are helpful in your planning and in measuring your results.

These are just a few resources that can help you in this area, but I wanted to limit this to just a few to get you started.  I know there are many more.  Please share some of your favorites in the comments and I’ll pass some of those on in another post.

Photo Credit: Fotolia

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