What is my Social Media Metrics?

So what the best way to find out the success of your Social Media Marketing Plan or Social Media Optimization Plan - whatever you may want to call it?

Is it the referral traffic you are getting? Is the volume of audience you can target for your marketing message? Is it the no. of registered users on your community site? Is it the time your community is spending on your site? Is the cost of developing/hosting your community site Vs the no. of customers you are acquiring from it? OR Is it a mix of all.

I believe, Social Media Marketing is an entirely new concept and implementing the traditional Marketing Metrics would not be fair. The best way to measure your success is to find out the engagement of your customers with your product/services. Tracking links, sign-ups, downloads, RSS, search engine traffic, online mentions, discussions on your community site would be a good idea to gauge how successful you are. There are no. of tools and techniques, like Google Alerts to high end social media monitoring services, that can be used to track all these. Nos. are one part and the content is another as in social media, your customers are talking not only to you but amongst each other as well. Its important to notice what is being said; who is talking to whom?

The real measure ofcourse would be to know whether your end business objective has been met or not but all these factors would help you to determine how much your social media efforts have contributed to meet your end business objectives.