15 ROI Metrics for Social Media

One of the barriers to Social Media investment is the insufficient metrics to measure the impact. That said, I have compiled a quick list of ROI metrics for Social Media. Use them in your campaigns or use them to convince management to make that resource marketing investment.

1. Uniques
2. Page Views
3. Comments and Trackbacks
4. Group creation
5. Time spend on site
6. Bounce Rate (the percentage of initial visitors to a site who "bounce" away to a different site)
7. Active members
8. Connections
9. Completed profiles
10. Friends/Fans
11. Links
12. Diggs
13. ReTweets
14. Return visits
15. Applications/Widget installs

Take a look at the above metrics. Does your sales correlate with the metric data? Keeping track of the data will give you an idea of whats working and whats not working in your Social Media strategy.

Google Analytics

I came across a neat Google Analytics widget app called "Polaris" (see screen shots below). Its cross platform and sits on your desktop. Easy install with the free version giving you access to one profile. If you have multiple profiles, you need to pay $15/year which is cheap if you have more than one website or blog. Just for the convenience alone, its worth installing. Check out the features:

• Overview of total visits, pageviews and other useful metrics.
• Switch between different date ranges.
• The visits reports gives you a day by day view on a nice chart.
• 8 different report modes.
• Google Maps report capability.
• Referring sites report provides a list with the top 25 referring sites.
• Which pages perform best with the top content report.
• Keywords report shows you which keywords are used mostly on organic searches.
• If you have one or more goals defined, this reports shows you a quick overview on how they are performing.

It literally takes about 5 minutes to install. This is a perfect example of how a simple little desktop widget comes in handy when your boss is on the phone asking you for quick metric data.

Is There a Scarcity of Good Marketing Today?

I'm beginning to think so. Bottom line: Good marketing = convert the leads into sales.The only marketing that has moved me in the last couple of years is Social Media optimization. Look for Social Media to infiltrate CRM applications. The CRM industry is just beginning to leverage the OpenSocial APIs. Look for it soon. Get on the bus people.