Social networking affects every company out there, more so if your company works with retail consumers directly.  Understanding how your company represents itself in social media is becoming a bigger part of marketing strategies. 

Go to Facebook and look at two competing retailers (Coke and Pepsi as an example) and see how many people like each one, how the companies have customized their respective walls, and see what people are saying (or not saying).  Beyond Facebook are hundreds of other social media outlets (Twitter, Digg, delicious, etc.) where these two companies are mentioned, raved, bashed, and justified as the king of sodas.  Lest not forget the search engine results that come back on any of those posts.  For these companies, paying attention to what the consumers are saying is helping them (sometimes driving them) in molding their respective product, branding, and marketing strategies.    

While perhaps not particularly as applicable to non-consumer driven companies (would you as a consumer want to know the latest happenings at Union Pacific unless you had direct business dealings with them), more and more interactions are being driven by the consumer, on their terms and in the way they want to receive and manage content.  This is a fundamental shift from the way that companies used to dole out information (everyone come to me if you wanted info or to share), now companies need to reach out to consumers and allow them to respond amongst themselves.

There are stout ramifications to the way companies now address the release of product information to their customers and potential customers, but like any other strategy, success needs to have some way of being gauged.  For social media, a series of metrics is available, some old, some new.  Used as an aggregate, they provide insight into how well a company is doing and helping them understand the demand for their products, services, or brands.   

Here are some of the more relevant metrics.  While not inclusive of all metrics that could be tracked, these make up the bulk of the metrics that companies need to review when gauging the success of their social media campaign performance.

Website Statistics 

Visitors – for the company website or from the various social media outlets, how many visits is your company receiving.  You will want to know about the uniqueness of the visitors and the path they are taking while visiting your sites.  You will also want to capture information about where the visitors are coming from and how they got to your sites as well as search terms used to find your sites. 

Conversion rate – this tells how many total visitors to your site vs. the number of visitors that did something on the site that you wanted them to do (such as register themselves as a contact, or purchase a product or service).  This helps in determining how well your site is helping your customers and potential customers take the next steps with your products and services.    

Bounce rate – as a contradictory measure from conversion, how many visitors just get to the site then leave without further navigation.

Other Site Statistics – other stats you’ll want to look at for your website include average page views (different pages visitors to your sites navigate to) and time on site (how much time does each users spend on the site).  These statistics are compared with conversion rates to help determine if your site is effective in leading your visitors to take action.   

Social Networking Statistics

Number of followers – an obvious one in the respective social media frameworks, but provides a gauge as to interest from consumers to your products or services - see the example above.  You will want to track these for the various social media outlets that your company is actively managing

Mentions – on the social media front, how many mentions is your product or service generating.  It is important to track both positive and negative mentions.  There are several tools that are available to help you determine where your company, product or service is mentioned across the various social media outlets.  This extends to all social media networks, not just the ones your company actively manages. 

Number of interactions – within the various social media outlets that your company is involved in, how many different threads in either your blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is being generated by customers or potential customers.  This is a way of determining if any of your mentions (positive or negative) or content has gone viral. 

These metrics can then be integrated with other traditional marketing metrics such as campaign costs / ROI, lead conversion, cross-selling efficiency, and customer retention rates.