There are 5 main metrics that you want to measure when you’re showing the ROI for social media marketing in terms of time and resources. These metrics are not a silver bullet but are surefire ways to show that you’re driving value for your business.

This is the first installment for Social Media ROI

Engagement:

Your engagement score is an indicator of how well you are communicating with your audience. The higher your engagement, the more valuable your audience will become to your business.

Measures how much time and energy your community managers are interacting with the community

Key metrics to look at:

• # of replies on multiple social platforms (twitter, Facebook, Q&A, social bookmarking blog)
• # of private messaging (DM, Emails)
• Set a weekly or daily goal for people to hit

Note: You’ll also need to measure true reach of engagements and sentiment this metric cannot stand alone

True Reach:

True Reach is the size of your engaged audience. Eliminate inactive and spam accounts, and only include accounts that you influence. To do this calculate influence for each individual relationship take into account factors such as whether an individual has shared or acted upon your content and the likelihood that they saw it.

Measure the effectiveness of your engagement and content

Key metrics to look at:

• @ messages
• Comments (blog, facebook, forums etc)
• Social bookmarking positive rankings
• Retweets
• Follows
• Lists

Sentiment:

What’s the context of the conversation that you’re creating. If you’re scoring high in engagement and true reach you need to understand the context of that audience’s conversation. Is what they’re saying positive or negative?

Sentiment shows the context of the conversations that you’re audience is having (positive or negative)

Key metrics to look at:

• Positive, neutral and negative sentiment rankings
• Search needs to be done on all platforms to get a true sample
• Conversion – Many people only look at the % of positive conversations converting negative commenters to positive/neutral conversations is more valuable
• Conversion ratio – # negative comments, # of engagements and # of negative to positive converted commenters

Impact on SEO:

Comparing your social media activities to your SEO trends is a great way to show social ROI. If you’re seeing similar search trends compared to your VOC you can draw a correlation that organic traffic going to your website is supported by social media.

SEO and social media are becoming more and more interrelated show how social is impacting SEO.

Key metrics to look at:

• Volume of Conversation (VOC) compared to search volume for related terms
• # of pieces of content created and page ranks for each one
• Top referring keywords compared to related social content and conversations
• Inbound links – what links were created by social media content and engagement

Social Graph Growth:

Keeping track of your social graph you can visual show the ROI of Engagement, Reach, SEO (link building).

You’ll also have a better idea where to concentrate your efforts to build new relationships and cultivate existing ones.

Free tool to use http://www.touchgraph.com

If there are other metircs that you think should be added to the list share them in the comments below:

For your downloading pleasure:

Social media conversations are unstructured, immediate and organic with enormous volume. Most tools focus simply on monitoring social media conversations, utilizing rudimentary keyword/Boolean search techniques. Social media requires elegant solutions that enable analytics on huge volumes of conversations while simultaneously gaining quick, deep understanding of voice-of-consumer to better inform strategic goals and plans.

Collective Intellect based out of Boulder Colorado has developed a great tool to allow people to identify, engage and report via the semantic web. Before I get into the nitty gritty here’s a quick infograph showing you why the semantic web matters.

Before semantic search most social media engagement or brand monitoring tools based their search off of Boolean logic. Or simply put key word search. Radian6, SM2 and many of the most well known social media monitoring and engagement brands are based off of Boolean logic. The problem with these tools being based off of Boolean logic when you search you’ll either get a large amount of noise (unwanted search results) or eliminate possible results because your parameters are to specific.

Using Semantic search as the basis of your social media reporting or monitoring delivers balanced results and identifies new nodes in your social graph that you’ve might of missed before.In the graph below I used the term “social media” and collective intellect semantic search groups and organizes relative conversations around this term. For instance if you used Boolean logic you would have to enter all of these keywords to get this kind of result however, most of the time you don’t know all of the keywords that people are using in context with your brand. This is the beauty of semantic search for social. Click the image below to try it for yourself.

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What’s your initial thoughts of semantic search for social media?

If you can’t measure it you can’t improve it, but what tools and metrics do you rely on to measure your success or failures in social media. Vocus just recently release their social monitoring tool allowing people to monitor and engage blogs, Facebook groups, forums and much more. Here’s a video with Kye Strance, discussing the new product, its target audience and how it’s selling

I’ll be testing out the tool shortly and will update with my review as soon as I can. If you’ve used this tool before share your thoughts with the community.

Today Traackr just release their Online Authority List at DEMO to make it easier for community managers, brand managers, PR fold and marketers to identify the top online influential voices. A few of the metrics that they use to identify influencers is by measuring their reach, resonance, and relevance around specific campaign initiatives.

The main concept around Traackr is to find individuals with the most “influence” so that you can directly interact with them. Now this isn’t completely new Radian6 has an influencer listing as well as some other tools. From my personal experience most of these tools are of little use, however they can give a quick snap shot to make sure the right people are picking up your story however it’s very difficult to find influencers in new communities that you haven’t reached out to yet. Moreover, from my experience, if you haven’t launched a campaign yet and you are trying to figure out whom you need to contact based on influence these tools rarely pick up on the right people.

It’s going to be interested to see how companies start addressing this issue. Let me know what tools you use to identify influencers.

The Human Element

To fill this gap there is an uprising in consulting companies and individuals who have noticed this opportunity and are willing to do some of the work. Most of these types of organizations will set up your dashboard and do little to engage the sentiment analysis for your company or product.
From all of this, measuring the human element of social media is vital in making sound business decisions and driving a successful social media campaign. My suggestion would be to buy the tool direct from the list above. Even though they are not perfect they are what we have right now that provide quality tools and all of them have great customer support. Then pick up a intern, or an existing employee to go through the tool and sort through all of the comments, blogs, and social post to decifer the sentiment of your audience. This is cheaper than a consulting firm and they’ll give you the answers that you need to make critical decisions.

Let me know your thoughts and experiences!

• Comments – scans blog for comment count

• Engagement – algorithm built in that captures number of unique commenters that have commented more than once and avg length of comment.

• Influence – captures all of these metrics

• Friends – n/a

• Followers – captures from twitter

• Downloads – You can export all of the information that is produced by the widgets (ex: posts from the River of News, graphs, etc.) except for
• individual posts (in the untitled media viewer).

• Favorites – there is no way as of now to “favorite” a post in the River of News, but you can mark the priority, the sentiment, add tags,
• etc. in the Workflow version of the River of News.

• Views - Captures view count from over 420 different video and image
• sharing sites (youtube, flickr)

• Votes - Captures vote counts from Dig, Delicious, and Readit

• Links - We will show you the on-topic inbound and outbound links in a site’s posts from the Influencer widget. We also give you links to other sites where an influencer would have a presence (Social Profile).

From all of the different features that Radian6 offers I find their ability to give you links to other sites where an user would have a presence or otherwise called a user’s “social profile” is a key component in monitoring and measuring your social media efforts. For instance, yesterday we talked about comments which are quintessential for monitoring and measuring your social media efforts however it’s hard to weigh a comment if you do not know anything about the user who left the comment.

As you can see below a user with a smaller “social profile might not have as much of an audience where their comments re valued.

A user with a limted social graph or "social profile"

Where in this picture user 2 has a much broader audience where or he/she can spread their thoughts to a much larger group of people.

A use with a much larger social graph or "social profile"

Initially you would weigh user 2′s comment heavier since it looks like they have a larger audience hence a larger influence. In some aspects this is true and you would definitively want to make sure you pay attention to people with a broad audience. Nevertheless, User 1′s audience may have more of an impact that user 2 simply because even though user 2 might have a large audience it does not mean that they have a major effect on that audience. User 1 might have a small social profile however the people that they are engaged with them have a deeper relationship then the relattionships of user 2 and hence user 1′s  audience will take action due to their social actions and comments. The influence of a user is very important and Radion6 does a great job giving you a glimpse of that user’s influence however there are some additional tools that help you unveil this that I’ll discuss next.

The first tool that I will cover in this series is BackType (@backtype), which indexes comments from around the web. I was lucky to have Christopher Gold, founder of BackType, answer a few questions about his company.

How did this whole project start?

“We wanted to be able to follow comments written by the people we care about. It was easy to follow all the blog posts, videos, tweets, and other user-generated content, but there was no way to follow comments. Despite having much greater ambition for the service today, we created BackType to solve a very simple problem we were experiencing.”

Why did you choose indexing comments?

“We believe online conversations are an overlooked and increasingly important subset of information online. Commenting is a ubiquitous online activity that creates, in our opinion, incredibly valuable (meta)data. An individual comment or review may have little value or meaning — but aggregating millions of them creates lots of context for consumers. For example, comment-like data is one of the top drivers of purchase decisions. We saw an opportunity to organize that information.”

How can people leverage your program?

“BackType is primarily used as a toolset for comment authors, but it’s also used by companies for customer support, public relations, etc. We have a feature called “BackType Alerts” that notifies you whenever someone mentions a search term in comments on blogs and other social media. When existing and potential customers talk about your brand, products or services, it’s important that you see it, and when appropriate, respond accordingly.”

How it can compliment the use of other metrics?

“For both publishers and marketers, the number of comments in response or connection to content of interest is a good starting point for measuring engagement. However, there are many more forms of engagement that can be measured, analyzed, etc. All “social metrics” are complementary to each other — it just depends which ones are most valuable to you.”

Comments are about building community and simplistically provide a way for people to contribute to your community. Whether it’s a community that you are trying to build and/or an existing community that you are engaging in, this part of social measurement is vital because social media is dependent on engagement. Measurement of engagement is not limited to “how many comments” a user receives however each comment can lead to something more such as ideas for improvement, measurement of sentiment, and hopefully conversations. To show you how engagement can move beyond a comment people can Digg your post, bookmark it through social bookmarkings sites, stumble it, or even share it through Facebook or other existing social networking platforms.

As you can see monitoring comments to analyze your social media projects is not an all-encompassing solution. However it’s a starting point to what kind of “strong ties” you are making with your community. There are many other tools that can be used to measure comments and we’ll cover those later. Nevertheless, if you have the time try BackType because familiarizing yourself with this tool will help you understand how it can be leveraged in your niche. As we dive into the social measurement toolbox you will start to notice that each application is different in how they assess the social world.

I’m going to be looking at social measurement tools that look at;

• Social bookmarks
• Comments
• Engagement
• Influence
• Friends
• Followers
• Downloads
• Favorites
• Views
• Votes
• Links
• And a few more…

Not all measurement tools have their algorithms public or fully disclosed so I’ll compare them to other companies that claim to do relatively the same measurements and basically see if they pull different results and try to weigh the pros and cons of both results. If you have any suggestions or are a company yourself that would like to have your measurement tools reviewed please leave me a comment and contact information so we can talk. You can also contact me at the social networking sites under the “Follow Me” section of my blog.