How do you monitor social media impact? First… get clear on your goals.

In this post, we’ll take a look goals for Social Media Marketing (SMM), business wise, and then some techniques for monitoring, reviewing and reporting on same.  Here’s what I’ll cover:

• Two basic objectives when setting Goals for Social Media Monitoring
• TweetReach Reporting for Reach of Tweets
• HootSuite Reporting for Reach & Demographics of Tweets
• Analytics Reporting for ROI

Two basic objectives when setting Goals

We’ll concentrate on two basic objectives for business tweeting:  Reach, which may also be a factor in influence, and unique site visitors sent via twitter who make a conversion goal at your site (ie. sign up for newsletter, fill out a lead form, etc.). There is also a case to be made in business for Twitter as a tool to build “brand awareness”, but you need actual research interviews to determine effectiveness. “Branding” does not automatically appear because you are visible. It occurs when your brand sticks in the memory of your target group.  To truly understand the effect of Social Media on your branding, you have to conduct focus groups and polls of real prospects.

So, let’s look at Reach and Important Unique Visitors, which we can study using online tools.

TweetReach Reporting for Reach

TweetReach.com reports on how many people saw a tweet — including those that retweeted it. Here is a chart for a tweet we sent approx. 24 hours ago — a tweet about studying up on techniques using HootSuite.

Above, we can see 8,567 impressions for two accounts on which we tweeted the same message. WebFadds, and WPsiteHosting (we have a marketing agreement with them) put the word out. Note two key tactics: we manage both twitter accounts in one HootSuite configuration, and we always recommend that all businesses can approach the market with via more than one Twitter account.

HootSuite Reporting for Reach

We’ve recent switched to HootSuite from EasyTweets, as our program of choice for managing multiple Twitter accounts. It also provides reach to FaceBook, LinkedIN, and via PINGfm — 40 other social networks. Plus HootSuite is leading the wave of smartphone use with apps available both for the iPhone and Android platforms.

Using HootSuite’s “Ow.ly” URL shortener enables you to chart how many people actually clicked on your tweet links. This takes it beyond visibility (number of people who saw a tweet) to influence (how many people followed your suggested links). Click to enlarge image.

Above, HootSuite additionally shows you of clicks by Region, and by Top Referrers. Click to enlarge image.

Analytics Reporting for ROI of Social Media

If you spend any time in business groups on LinkedIN (recommended) you will see debates ranging about the relevance of Social Media in corporate MARcom planning. While there are still some arguing against it, most now believe it is a key area for inclusion in marketing budgets, including C-Level Marketing Execs. who rank it highly on this current poll we have there (take the poll to see demographics of respondents): POLL – The Best ROI for Online Marketing in 2010 will come from…

Since cost-conscious managers are anxious to justify time and effort spent on Social Media, one good way to study ROI, is to take a look at Google Analytics (you do have an analytics package installed, don’t you?), for how many people visit your site from a Social Media venue… and what they do next. If you further have $ value goals set up (you should), you can find out how many completed a business goal of value to your company.  You should also pay attention to custom user segments — and one we highly recommend is “engaged users” — those viewing 3 or more pages at your sites.

Above we can see that Titter sent the most visitors (191) in a two month period, and that around 6% of those visitors were engaged on WebFadds.com.  But it is Linkedin.com that shows both the best percentage of engaged visitors (25%), and also shows that 40% of those visitors filled out a lead form on our site — completing “conversion goal” in Analytics terminology.  This tells us a couple of very important things — we need to target our Twitter followers better, or provide content to better serve them, and our LinkedIN strategy is paying off.