CDG Interactive Blog

Metrics are the holy grail of social media - how can you tell what's working? In their new ebook Radian6 explores some easy and practical ways to measure your social media efforts.  

There were a few points in particular that stood out:

First, decide your business goals and then choose metrics that illustrate progress toward those goals.

And second, start with an hypothesis like, "Increased activity on Twitter will decrease call center volume and costs." Then measure that over time to see if it holds up. Just keep in mind that factors like annual sales are affected by so many factors that one activity can't generally claim credit (unless you're advertising during the Super Bowl), so that's usually not a good hypothesis to start with.

And the book included a hint that requires a little bit of extra effort up front, but will be well worth it for tracking purposes. When sharing links through a URL shortener, first create a unique URL using Google URL generator (or your analytics tool) including the parameters for the content and the social network where you plan to share it. Then use bit.ly or another shortening service to shorten the unique URL. That way you will be able to track referrals and conversion rates for each unique URL. Of course, that won't help you when others create shortened URLs for your content, but that will tell you something as well.

Have you successfully tested any hypotheses with metrics? What did you find?