Virtually all successful businesses have implemented some form of social media marketing campaign. Whether they Tweet, post updates to their blogs, post content on their Facebook Wall, post photographs to Instagram or do all of the above, the ultimate goal of each of these activities is to drive lead production and to convert leads to paying customers. How can you decipher whether your social media marketing campaign is working for your business?

Social media marketing success is generally measured two ways; ongoing analytics and campaign-focused metrics. Ongoing analytics track marketing activities over set time periods. Campaign focused metrics capture key data about specific marketing initiatives. Effective social media marketing efforts measure and capture data using both forms of measurement.

As you begin to track the successes of your social media campaigns, consider the following steps:

1. Establish Goals and Priorities– What do you hope to accomplish as a result of your social media marketing efforts; broadcasting company information, answering customer questions, engaging with a focused community, lead generation, lead conversion? And, what do you want your audience to do with the posted content? Do you want them to share information with their network, reply to your organization directly, engage further with your business or complete a purchase?
2. Create Measurement Metrics– Now that you have clearly identified what you would like to accomplish, you need to establish metrics in which to measure ongoing successes against. For example, if one of your objectives is to improve engagement, which customer activities do you intend to track? Will you measure the number of retweets or post? Or, how many times customers reply to posts or place comments? Here are some tips to consider when creating measurement metrics:
   1. When measuring customer engagement, capture data about the number of retweets, comments left, and replies made.
   2. If your goals include increasing website traffic, track the number of URL shares received, clicks and conversions.
   3. If your goals include increasing the number of advocates and fans, track contributor volume. Who is talking about your business and what is the relative impact of these activities?
   4. If your goals include increasing brand awareness online, track conversion volume. Who is talking about your brand and/or industry? And, what are they specifically discussing? i.e. what are the ‘hot’ topics of the moment.
   5. Measure, Measure, Measure– You cannot assess whether a marketing initiative is getting traction without accurate marketing metrics in which to analyze. Once you have identified which metrics are key for your organization to gather and analyze, search for tools that will help you accomplish these goals. Some social media platforms and marketing platforms will offer internal marketing analytics tools while in other cases, you may need to leverage 3^rd party tools to capture key metrics data.

Following the steps outlined above will enable you to not only launch a more successful social media marketing campaign, but to gather important data needed to decipher which initiatives are working and which need to be tweaked.