What social media marketing metrics are you using?

The latest research from MarketingSherpa indicates that businesses using social media to promote their products and services — and fill their lead streams — are employing a variety of measures to gauge the effectiveness of their initiatives. Of course, the metrics you’d expect have been most widely adopted, but there are some important stats being watched by a small group of companies that signal where social media marketing is headed.

Unsurprisingly, 72 percent of respondents are measuring the number of visitors they receive, as well as traffic sources — for example, how many they are receiving from Twitter, LinkedIn and Google. Sixty-three percent still use network size (e.g., number of fans, friends or followers), and watching for commentary on products, services and brands is high.

The categories that didn’t get many responses, however, are those that matter most when trying to track the ROI associated with social media. Forty-eight percent are watching the number of leads generated via social media, and 38 percent track engagement with influential journalists, bloggers and Twitter users. Thirty-five percent go so far as to measure sales conversions and other ROI-related stats, and 19 percent evaluate competitive share of social media coverage.

Among the most important is the use of social media to identify and profile audiences. For enter:marketing, which takes a unique and comprehensive approach to prospect profiling, this is an incredibly valuable application of social media, and the fact that only 17 percent of respondents are doing this means only that there’s plenty of room for growth.

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[Source: MarketingSherpa]