The question I am asked most often by businesses thinking of engaging my services is: “What return will I get for my investment?”

With any type of marketing you need to know if it is successful so that you can repeat it. So when you place a print ad you should be able to measure the number of responses you get. You should know how many visitors your website gets each week and how many of them click on links or contact you through it. When you distribute leaflets you must be able to measure the response rate or else there is no point. Social media is no different, like any other form of marketing you need to be clear about the objectives before investing. What is the purpose of the campaign? Is it to increase traffic to your store or website? Is it to make more money? Is it to cut other marketing costs? Is it to grow your e-mail or subscriber list?

How do you go about measuring the success of a social media campaign? Well, start with collecting some of the more obvious data: followers, fans, links and visitors. Take note of some SEO and ROI benchmarks such as rankings, cost of acquiring customers, size of marketing budget and details of the success of each marketing channel.

Next, put into place some basic measurement criteria:

1.  Traffic: probably the most obvious measure but you should remember that quality is usually more important than quantity.
2. Participation: this takes many forms and it may not just happen on your site, reviews and ratings can be placed on external sites so keep monitoring.
3. Sales: make sure that you can identify the source of your customers; with social media this can be quite easy.
4. Sales Leads: the ability to track this depends on your line of business; sometimes it is easy, sometimes it isn’t.
5. Search: this is where a little effort can yield big rewards. One strategically placed promotional piece can result in a significant number of referrals and links and can push your name up the Google rankings.
6. Brand Awareness: social media campaigns can improve brand awareness which can be measured by increased clicks on paid search ads.
7. Engagement: social media makes it easier to engage with customers and let them know you are listening to them and responding to their concerns, complaints or praise. Engaged customers = loyal customers.
8. Retention: greater customer engagement results in higher rates of customer retention and improvements in repeat sales.
9. Profitability: improved retention means more business from existing customers and more referrals from them.

Social media is not a quick fix. I took a while to become recognised as a credible social media “expert” but now almost all my business comes through social media and even BBC Radio invited me to talk about social media on a business programme.

Remember that social media can be cheaper than traditional media for marketing your business but it does take time, so if you can’t spare the time – get help.