Recently on LinkedIn, Emily Foshee asked:

How do you measure ROI from your social media campaigns? Do you go by new fans on your Facebook page? Do you go by traffic increases to your company’s website? Or do you go by visitor/page reviews?

The short answer for us is “all of the above,” The long answer is, “it depends.”

We find that social media has benefits in 4 main areas:

• Generating awareness of your brand
• Increasing engagement with your brand
• Increasing your brand’s influence
• Motivating specific actions (purchases, leads, sign-ups etc).

Different clients will have different objectives within that range of possibilities, so we’ll craft a custom dashboard to help them track the stuff that’s most meaningful in terms of their objectives.

To measure awareness, we’ll use metrics like unique Web site visitors, page views, fan/follower counts etc.

To measure  engagement, we’ll use metrics like comments (blog, facebook, etc), ReTweets, time spent on the Web site and so on.

To measure influence, we’ll track third-party mentions and links and things like that.

And to measure action outcomes, we’ll track total conversions/sign-ups and conversion/sign-up rates.