Social Media Marketing has become an important weapon in the marketing arsenal of every company whether or not it sells its products online. More and more companies jump into social network marketing field to promote their brand or product, and they are bringing huge amount of marketing dollar in as well. In fact some companies have marketing departments focused only on online social media marketing. Online social media is constituted by online social community sites like Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, professional networking sites like LinkedIn and the latest craze in instant messaging Twitter.

So as more and more of your marketing investments are getting focused on social media let’s explore some ways in which we can evaluate the return on investment from social media marketing.

Some of the well accepted methods for social media marketing performance measuring:

1. Impressions: Measuring the impressions (number of times your ad was flashed on the social media site with which you have registered) that you are getting is most important. Generally banner ads are displayed to users based on behavioral targeting. Most companies generally have their own compiled list of users that they would like the ads to be displayed to when on the site. Usually these list are compiled after collecting and analyzing 3^rdparty data. Impressions can be easily measured through tools like Dart.

2. Traffic: One major purpose of social media marketing is to drive traffic to website; it’s all free and can be tracked clearly. If you are selling advertisements on your website as well, use CPM (Cost per Mil: Cost of 1000 impressions) to calculate the ROI of social media performance.

3. Shares. People on social network platform do love to share their ideas and links with friends. They submit website links & content to major platforms, when they think these are interesting or informative. It’s been called ‘word of mouth online’. So consider below 2 points on social media marketing shares:

• How many of your website / pages have been submitted to Digg, StumbleUpon, etc..?
• How many times of your company name or product name has been mentioned over twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn? (Twitter has tools like tweetstats to help you get the info you need )

4. Contacts acquisition: Acquire new contacts is one of most important thing for online marketing. The normal way is like: ’subscription box’, ‘ask opt-in in online survey’ or ‘list buy’, and you can also leverage social media marketing to acquire new contacts. People come to social network platform is intend to make friends, so be friends with them, influence them in each update, convert them as your client. How many contacts you acquired from social platform is critical factor to measure social media marketing performance.

5. Revenue: Measuring the revenue generated through social media is very important to understand how you are doing w.r.t to your social media campaigns. This is rather simple thing to do by simply embedding the tagging code in the link/ad to your site

6. Competitive Analysis: The most important of them all is to understand how you are doing w.r.t your competitors in the social media space. This will help you understand how your campaigns are doing and what changes need to be made.