Last week we talked about how you can’t rush social media results. This week we’re going to talk about how to measure those very results. This is kind of a road map that let’s you know you’re on the right track.

One of the first obvious things you want to look at is how many followers you have on all mediums. Are people finding you interesting enough to follow? Benchmark this against other people in your field and the medium and you have your first measurement set.

The second thing is to get Google Analytics on your site immediately so you can see what your efforts are bringing your company as far as website traffic. I personally know that Twitter is the third most popular referrer to my site. Number 7 is Facebook. LinkedIn is not in the top 10, so that tells me that maybe I need to put a little more effort into that site. Through using Google Analytics, a free tool that requires your webmaster to apply some code to your pages, you can see your results in real time.

The third is to simply ask people how they found your company. This is probably the most commonly overlooked tool in a business owner’s toolbox. I ask every single person who calls our company how they found us and 99% of the people will answer the question even down to what keywords they put into Google or another search engine.

The real problem with social media is that there isn’t any one answer to measuring effectiveness. I have a feeling that will change as more collaboration tools come on the market that bring all of these social media platforms together such as Google Wave (http://wave.google.com). The reason it’s hard to really measure ROI is because few people accurately track of how much time they put into Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. I think the next killer app will be a tool which will give us a good snapshot of time versus return. Let me know when its ready!