About Social Media:

The Art of Quantification:
Your Social Media Return
on Investment

Social networking and blogging are great ways to communicate with customers. They are fun but do require additional work to ensure your efforts give the results you are looking for.

Blogging and using services such as Twitter and Facebook is a fantastic experience, especially if you are passionate about your product or service. If you are not, do yourself a favour and watch this short video with Gary Vaynerchuk:

It can be like an addiction. Your audience grows and people are genuinely interested in what you have to say. Unfortunately, these activities are also time consuming, which is why it is paramount to constantly monitor your performance. At the end of the day, your time is your only currency and you have a limited supply.

Cost and profit

Blogging and social networking are not only the cheapest ways to advertise your business but also the best. You can convey your message whenever you choose and select the profile of people you want to target. The result? More interest, more sales, more money and greater satisfaction.

Unfortunately, the time gap between your effort and the result can be large. If you are not selling a desirable product or service, it will take time to convince people that they really what you've got. Fortunately, there are tools to monitor this long process. Using them will take a bit more of your time, but will save a lot more of it once you act on the feedback.

How is your blog going?

If you write interesting articles on your blog, your website visitors will share them with friends on Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks. But you can also use tools such as SocialMention to monitor these events in real-time.

Social Mention can provide plenty of useful information. You can check any mentions of your brand in blogs, microblogs, images, videos, news and more. You can even set up email alerts - all that for free!

PostRank is another great and free service to check your influence. Once your blog is indexed you can see the engagement level for each post and this can help to determine what people like to read about and the services they use to share your content. Use that information wisely. Write about the subjects that gain most attention and make it easy for your readers to share your blog posts.

Using these tools alone will generate a lot of feedback. Monitor them regularly and improve your blog articles. It is rewarding to see that people actually see value in the information you provide, so let your ideas spread.

How social are you?

Social Mention gives you a summary of your brand on the internet, but if you want to investigate how well you are doing on Twitter there are numerous tools to use. Twitter is the most popular microblogging platform because it is extremely easy to share content.

To monitor your Twitter performance, I recommend using Klout. Klout is a comprehensive analytical package for Twitter users. You can check your influence, reach, demand and velocity in the Twitter universe. You can also see the links shared by you that generate the most clicks. This is a valuable tool and you should use it at least once a week to pinpoint areas to improve.

TwitterCounter also deserves a mention. Its list of features is less comprehensive but it does provide useful information about your follower count and can offer predictions. It also allows you to compare up to three Twitter users. It's like Compete for Twitter.

Keep it up

It does not matter which tools you use. You might even want to go for paid options such as UberVU. The important thing is to keep it up, be consistent and use the feedback to change the way you use social media and blogs. After all, you invest a lot of time and it's good to know what you get in return.

Share your own experiences with us! What are your favourite tools and websites for monitoring your social media campaigns? Leave your comments below.