There are many proven social media monitoring techniques, from simple mention tracking to

sophisticated sentiment analysis, to measure the success of your social media marketing efforts. These techniques can be combined with your existing digital campaign analytics to provide insight into how your social media efforts are influencing and augmenting your overall marketing activity.

Typical objectives could include:

Financial ROI:

This is the one your senior team will want to see. As social media marketing tends not to be

a lead-generating activity, financial ROI can be hard to measure. It’s not impossible, however.

Olivier Blanchard, author of Social Media ROI, has developed a methodology 6

for measuring the impact of your social marketing initiatives on your bottom line, which is well

worth exploring. Increasingly, companies are investigating ways of incorporating SM metrics

data into marketing automation solutions such as Eloqua, Marketo or Coremetrics and we see

this becoming an ever more prominent topic throughout 2011.

Brand awareness

While monitoring social media mentions alone will not give an idea of sentiment, it can indicate

how aware your market is of your brand in relation to the competition. Results can be correlated

against recent brand awareness campaigns to determine their effectiveness.

Product/Brand perception:

By combining social media mention monitoring with sentiment analysis, you can analyse the

market response to your product news or corporate announcements in real time as well as

after the fact.

Trend Reversal

Social media activity can have a positive impact on a downward trend. You will need to clearly

define the trend in question, the metrics you will use to establish the point at which it has been

reversed, and the tools and timescales you will use to measure progress.

Demand Generation

Tracking social media-generated traffic to your destination sites (e.g. a thought leadership blog

post or campaign microsite) or content (e.g. white paper, video or webcast) will show the extent to

which your social media activity is creating interest and demand.

Lead Generation

Leads directly generated through your social media activities can be tracked by various

methods, including voucher codes, clickthrough analysis or even asking prospects where they

heard about your brand/product/offer.