Despite the trendiness of social-media channels such as Facebook and Twitter, a whopping question lingers: Does marketing on these sites drive revenue or other measurable results? Learn how to treat your social-media forays as more traditional marketing campaigns, so you can begin to muscle through the hype and establish a baseline of actual concrete results.

Figure out what you want from social marketing

Of course, you can easily gauge the “buzz” factor provided by social media, for example, by monitoring the number of Facebook fans your company snagged or total hits to your blog. You can tally customer comments, or you can monitor sites such as Digg or Twitter as a barometer of brand awareness. (Read How Marketers Can Tweet Their Companies to Greater Success .)

But if you’re trying to use social networks to meet revenue, lead-generation, email-list-building or other conversion goals, you'll need to dig deeper – then experiment to improve your results. This requires measuring how well your campaigns perform on social-media sites, compared with each other and with other channels. 

To begin, think about what you’d like to achieve using social media and what is actually measurable. Let's say driving revenue is the goal of a marketing campaign, so you link to a promotional offer or coupon from a social-media site. To measure effectiveness, you might calculate the percentage of social click-throughs that actually make it to an order receipt or thank-you page.

If growing your email lists is a priority, you can embed "social sharing" links in your email-marketing campaigns to encourage readers to post your content on their favorite social sites, then track how many of your new subscribers come from social channels.

Or if generating leads is your top aim, you can look at the number of social visitors who register for a webinar or download a white paper or even spend a particular amount of time doing heavy-duty product research on your site.

You’re likely to be disappointed with the number of conversions that result directly from a social link, but that doesn’t mean social media is completely ineffective. You should also measure at least one engagement metric, such as "average time on site" or "page views per visitor." These can tip you off to visitors who might not be ready to take action, but who stuck around on your site past the initial landing page. 

But first, you'll need to do a tiny bit of housekeeping to make your social-media efforts measurable.

Put adequate tracking on your social links

The best way to report on your social-media traffic is to assign URL tracking parameters to your links, as you do with email and keyword campaigns.

This is especially critical when it comes to social marketing, because much of your social traffic won't come directly from social Web sites. For example, many Twitter users don't go to Twitter.com to send or read tweets, they use a third-party application like TweetDeck. Embedding tracking data in the links themselves ensures that you count all social traffic, even when it comes from sites you don't expect.

To add tracking parameters to your links, take the URL of the Web page you plan to link to, add a question mark and then add data that will make it easy for you to identify each specific campaign, such as:
http://www.your-landing-page.com?campaign=bluewidget&socialsrc=twitter .

As outlined in the example above, we recommend adding two tracking parameters to each link: one that designates the name of the particular marketing campaign you're linking to and one that designates which social site you're posting on. You must separate your two tracking parameters with the & symbol.

In our example, the two parameters are campaign and socialsrc. The respective values assigned to these parameters are bluewidget and twitter.

Our example is just that: an example. You have the freedom to name your parameters and assign values using whatever words and abbreviations you prefer. (The one exception is if you rely on Google Analytics. In this case, instead of just adding the tracking parameters to the end of your URL, you have to follow Google-specific link-tagging instructions .)

Now that you have links with tracking code firmly in place, use a URL-shortening service such as bit.ly or TinyURL to condense your links before you post them on various social sites. This has two advantages:

• It gives you more room in Twitter's 140-character universe to hype your link.
• It hides all of your tracking parameters, so your links don't stand out on social sites like three-piece suits at a family picnic.

Set a baseline for your social campaign results

Now you can use your Web-analytics software, such as Lyris HQ , to figure out just what kind of return you're getting from your social-marketing efforts.

• Make your goals measurable. You can easily tag pages that represent the completion of a milestone, such as thank-you pages for making a purchase, joining an email list or filling out a lead-generation form, as "goal pages." This lets your software tally up the number of visitors who took any of the desired conversion actions, without requiring you to individually analyze each goal page.
• Start with a high-level view of your data. Your Web-analytics tool allows you to filter campaign reports based on any parameter you select. So, to use our previous example, if you ran reports based on the parameter called socialsrc, you'd get a table displaying the results for each specific value assigned to it. So you might end up with separate rows of Facebook, Twitter and Digg stats that highlight how the sites differ on variables like the overall number of visitors, the number who reached a goal page, average time on site, campaign costs and other metrics.
• Drill down as needed. When you spot unusual trends, look at navigation paths on specific landing pages or run funnel reports to try to formulate theories about what's happening and why. For example, Twitter and Facebook may send equal amounts of traffic, but Facebook may have twice the conversion rate. Why? Maybe Twitter users need a different, more detailed landing page because they only see short blurbs up front.
• Track your stats. Take a snapshot of where you are now. It doesn't have to be fancy or comprehensive – a simple inventory of a few key metrics is fine. This tells you exactly what social's doing for you today, so you can get more out of it tomorrow.

From social buzz to campaign tracking

Tracking social-media campaigns as you would other marketing efforts helps you take your eye off the buzz and put it back on the marketing ball. Practicing this consistently over time can help you increase sales, enhance your lists, grow more leads and succeed where your competitors flail.