(Taken from the new How to Track and Measure Social Media Marketing guide by Vocus)

With social, we are passing the peak of

faddishness. Companies are starting to

crack social‟s code and turning to it for

business advantage, intelligence and

insight.

“”

Gerald Kane, Carroll School of Management at Boston College

The data we require comes from

multiple sources. We need to integrate

it, compare it and connect it to our

business systems to see what effect

these posts, tweets, shares and clicks

are having on our business.

“

”Brendon O’Donovan, Vocus

You have to be able to place a monetary

or quantitative value on the end result.

For a „standard‟ B2B company, your

funnel is:

Sales, Opportunities, Leads, Prospects, A

udience. If you map out the funnel

well, you should be able to set values per

stage of the funnel, in reverse.

“

”Christopher Penn, SHIFT Communications

You can only measure what you‟re in

control of. Success, in terms of

metrics, is dictated by your ability to

control points of measurement and get

people in your organization to agree on

basic measurements and how to pull

them.

“

”Marshall Sponder, Web Metrics Guru

When it comes to people taking some sort of

social action and then correlating that with

sales, we like to tie the two together…

Commerce being the simplest example, I

might look to my social network as a channel

that generates sales, so I would put a

promotion out to that group: „Thanks for

following or circling – here‟s an offer.‟ Those

kinds of things are very trackable.

“

”Justin Cutroni, Google Analytics Evangelist

When you‟re getting into attribution

modeling, start with a basic model. For

most businesses in e-commerce, a decay

model is a good one to use. For a last-

click model, you may see social having a

low value, but in a decay model, a very

high value.

“

”Justin Cutroni, Google Analytics Evangelist

Want to measure social media better? The new Social Media Measurement Guide

from Vocus includes more advice from

Marshall Sponder, Christopher Penn and

Justin Cutroni. It covers:

o Essential social media metrics and KPIs

o Essential Google Analytics features for beginners

o Attribution modeling to discover the actions that lead

to outcomes

o Metrics for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn

and Pinterest