
Put in enough time to achieve your goals and then move on to other important business-building activities. There's nothing wrong with spending some of your time on social networking, but spending hours a day at it is probably not the best thing for your business or your ROI.
Set up your goals.
Is it to get people to download a white paper on your websiteTo fill out a form for a free consultation? Only then can you effectively calculate ROI. You need to be able to see what people are doing, like clicking on a link you posted to get to your website. Part of setting up analytics (Google Analytics or a paid platform) will be creating a tracking token per goal. Most marketers have more than one goal: on the home page, it may be to sign up for a newsletter, while on an inside page it may be to download an eBook.
You want to be able to see which actions had which results, rather than ending up with a giant pool of stats, you can't make sense of. There are online tools that let you generate these tracking tokens, or you can hire a professional marketing company to make analyzing metrics much easier on yourself.
Get to know Twitter Analytics.
Don't forget
Hashtags can be a really effective marketing tool, but many marketers don't understand how to track their ROI. Not sure what hashtags are? Check out 'A Newbie's Guide to Hashtags on Social Media'.You can track the number of interactions with your hashtag (how many people like, share, comment or retweet the content) to see how well a particular tag is performing. It's just one of the ways to see if the time and/or money you're putting into social media is paying off.
Check examples from the BizTalk, a global community of women and the men who support them as they "challenge the world, think big, & make a change." During one of their recent Twitter Chats, they've asked people to name their favorite conference using the hashtag #BizGalz so they can easily see who's engaging with the chat.