How to Measure Success and Benefits of Social Media Campaign

While social media campaigns are becoming increasingly popular among Internet marketers and is today considered as a mainstream marketing tool, it is important that we define some method to measure the success or effectiveness of such campaigns.

The traditional methods of measuring success of any internet marketing campaign can be put into two points

1. Increase in Unique Visitors and Page Views
2. Increase in ROI

However, with Social Media Campaigns none of these seems to be the perfect parameter to measure success. Social media is about people and building relationships. Social Media campaigns develop by fostering connectivity between people and developing communities. It is therefore powered by collective knowledge and gives a closer reflection of the real life., which makes it very difficult to quantify the success of a social media optimization campaign.

Eric Peterson puts up a more logical view to calculate effectiveness of Social Media Optimization by measuring how "engaged" a visitor is when they come to your website.

Eric defines an engaged visitor as one who involves in

1. Reading my weblog
2. Reading other user generated content on the web site
3. Participating in a truly social activity facilitated by my site
4. Joining a social network of web analytics people
5. Contributing content directly to the web site
6. Submitting a comment to my weblog
7. Emailing me directly

Now considering these points, we need to agree that visitors who subscribe to some type of "push" feed are more engaged compared to the ones who view content sporadically. Also, it can be concluded that a visitor who just reads the blog has got moderate level of engagement, while someone reading the content and contributing to the content has got a higher level of engagement.

Now what do we get from this "engaged" visitors? Do they actually contribute to your sales and improve your ROI ?

As Jeremiah Owyang says:
"Some folks tied measurement back to hard ROI: (Does Social Media shorten the sales cycle/reduce cost, and does it increase revenues). For other companies, business blogging is about thought leadership, or building better products, how could you apply these models to the Wells Fargo blogs, that are designed at reaching out to communities?"

Your Social Media Campaign can actually help you to create :

1. Thought Leadership
2. Provides a platform for two way communication with the consumers for the companies
3. Get valuable customer feedback that contributes towards improving your existing product ideas
4. New product ideas can generate through user contribution
5. Increase your credibility
6. This "engaged" users can be a great media to spread the word about your new products and service.

So, though not directly contributing to the sales, SMO has actually become an extermely important marketing weapon for the corporates and can effectively contribute to brand building and also gives them a direct access to understand their consumer reactions.