How do you measure the impact of your social media efforts?

Measuring the impacts of your social media efforts is a difficult task at best, but how do you connect this to your bottom line?

In my opinion all social media efforts are in place to funnel online activity to your call to action pages that are manged out side of the social media arena. Others will have different opinions and explain why they think the way they do.

Social media is a very powerful marketing tool, but there are difficulties in measuring its success. having  a large number of Facebook followers does not necessarily translate into a large number of people buying your product or using your service, and the correlation between face book likes and feet in to physical stores is quite difficult as followers may live in foreign countries / out of state .

That is why target market selection is critical in your social media efforts. FB adds can be very effective if you use the Geo-targeting tools made available, but still extremely difficult to measure. Other  social media operators also allow for Geo-marketing but none offer any tools on how to measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts.

how do you tie your social media efforts to your bottom line? read here and then decide which way you want to go, and what actions you can take to convince your boss to spend more on social media marketing.

I firmly believe that your social media efforts need to be seen as promoting  your existing online sales and marketing efforts which need to be managed as a collective entity keeping your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) policies and principles in place and ensuring complete integration of all your marketing / online sales channels.

If you do this  you will have the tools to measure the success of your marketing efforts and keep tabs on the separate parts with out loosing the fact that they are part of an integrated system.  read this and think about what I have said here today