BizSugar.com › Products and Services › How to Measure Social Media Marketing; 3 Steps

Social media marketing, like other forms of online marketing, needs to produce a return on investment. Otherwise, its usefulness is marginal and the time spent on it is wasted. But social media's effect on the bottom line is not always easy to measure.In social media's case, ROI does not always mean "return on investment." Sometimes, it means "return on influence" or ROE, "return on engagement," both of which are harder to measure.Any attempt to measure social media must contain elements of all three to adequately represent its full impact. Traditional metrics include page views, time spent on site, unique visits and number of conversions apply, but that's far from the whole of it. Measurements like number of retweets, blog post comments and number of friends on a social network are important, too.