My first panel here at SXSW was about analytics…social media analytics. From a business perspective, it is absolutely imperative to measure the outcomes of your social media efforts because otherwise, it’s a pointless pursuit. I got to hear two experts talk about the basics of what is necessary to measure, and industry standards. I felt the presentation was more consumer focused, so I asked the presenters how the information would change for B2B…they responded that social media is even more important for B2B since there are less communication platforms for B2B than B2C. Here are some basic ideas:

What are the basic metrics used to measure social media efficacy?

Number of mentions by type, source, or channel- this means how many times your company/brand is mentioned on forums, blogs, twitter, etc. This may be relative to industry. For example, cars are more often discussed in forums whereas restaurants are more on Twitter.

Key themes emerging from conversations- Here, you can easily spot trends among what is being discussed about your brand. An example the experts used was Jamba Juice. As they were monitoring conversations about their brand online, they noticed the word “milk” kept coming up. They found out that a rumor had spread that Jamba Juice used dairy products in one of their recipes, which is contrary to their claim of being completely non-dairy. Jamba was able to quell concerns early by acting on those concerns before things became too widespread.

Most viral content- As measured by retweets, traffic, views, etc. This will help guide future social media campaigns. If one topic in a blog garnered more retweets or one blog article drives more traffic, cover it more.