By Yosef Solomon on Feb 19, 2010

Depending on your initial goals, social media success can be based on a number of different areas and outcomes. For small businesses, one might look to a site like Yelp and work towards higher ratings and reviews. For larger corporations like Nordstrom, some may find success in customer satisfaction. Either way quantifying social media success varies on multiple levels based on your size, reach and goal. In this post I’ve listed 4 general ways to quantify social media success. Whether you’re a sole proprietor or full-scale corporation, you’ll discover new ways to measure success.

1) Monitoring Online Presence-

This is probably the most obvious measure of success in social media. Improved online presence can mean a lot of things, but for the sake of argument we’re looking at numbers. Twitter followers, Facebook friends, @Replies, Retweets etc… “>By tracking these numbers and setting goals for what you’d like to see improve, you’re defining the foundation of your growth measurement. This is important because, as time goes on, you can look back and see how much you’ve improved your presence. Often times people get obsessed with these numbers and put too much emphasis on “getting more twitter followers.” This shouldn’t be the case. I’m simply saying that you should keep track of these numbers and use them as indicators for your online presence.

2) Conversion Rate-

In order for social media to be a viable business model, one must track the conversion rate of what people are doing after they come to your website. Whether you have an e-commerce site or you utilize Google Adsense, conversion rates are the key factor in quantifying social media success. Without knowing who’s clicking content to product, it becomes difficult defining what content works and what doesn’t. By understanding the conversion rate of an article, we’re able to identify the important content and replicate it in the future.

3) Referral Sources-

Where are your customers coming from? It’s important to know how your customers reached your homepage because it lets you know what’s working. Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon or Digg, by identifying the source, you’ll be able to ramp up your efforts on the network bringing you the most traffic.

4) Subscriptions and Email Lists

Whether you publish online greeting cards or viral videos, identifying your core audience is an important factor in social media success. No better way can this be done than through subscription or email lists. These lists show factual data on your core audience and those loyal to your brand. Although there will always be stragglers that simply sign up for the free swag, maintaining a growing list of your audience is important in quantifying your success.

The four options I listed above are not meant to be the only factors that quantify social media success. Often times success in social media can’t be quantified. Improving the customer/audiences’ experience is the overall goal. Once companies are able to understand this concept, their social media efforts will begin to mirror their goals.