There are different ways of measuring your social campaign: here are 3

There are over 1 billion members on Facebook and the member base keeps on growing. On Facebook and Twitter, many businesses sporting thousands of fans and followers, but are they actually really worth anything? In my personal opinion, having thousands of followers and fans doesn’t necessarily mean that your social media campaign is working. This might show that you are doing well on the social web, but in reality it’s only a vanity metric.

If you really want to see if your campaign is actually effective, find below a couple of calculations you can do to give you an idea. The tips below will give qualitative measurement results that you can use to measure the success of your campaign.

Engagement score
On the social web, the engagement score can be measured in a number of different ways such as the number of comments or replies you receive for every update you make. Businesses who cultivate a higher number of comments and replies most likely understand their target audience much better, how their brand attributes translate directly to them, and how they can add value to them. A high engagement score usually requires a lot of work, but it can help you gain valuable market insight and increase the size of your network.

Amplification
This metric measures the number of shares per update and this gives you a good indication of whether your content is magnetic. If your business has one thousand followers on Facebook, then your potential reach is not only one thousand. If your followers share your content, it can reach many more amplifying your reach. This also gives you a very good benchmark on what magnetic content your network really value.

You can also see what your “amplification” rate is by the number of shares, retweets, likes or +1s that you earn for every magnetic content item you share and update. If your followers share your content, it does boost your social authority and can increase your organic search engine rankings, as more people will see it.

ROI Value
The ROI value of your social media campaign should give you ROI information that you can actually quantify. You can measure metrics such as revenue per social media visit and what is your conversion rate from every social media channel that you use.

This is quite easy to set up directly in Google Analytics with a couple of goals and campaigns. One way to measure it is by analysing the amount of traffic and conversions that came through a certain campaign or content item on your website or blog that you have shared.

There are many other ways that you can use to measure the true effectiveness of your social media campaign and trust me, one hat doesn’t fit all. The trick with measuring the ROI of your social media campaign is to tie it directly back to your business goals and overall marketing plan.

Social media is all about engaging and connecting with your target audience. To make your campaign skyrocket, never lose the importance of the data you gather and how you can use this data to increase the effectiveness of your campaign. Data stays just “data” when it’s not used. When used, it can help you make a success of your campaign.

Image: Barbara Krawcowicz via Flickr.