A checklist for checking in your brand’s social media sites

With debate as to the best way to measure ROI for social media efforts and the overabundance of tools and software to calculate it in different ways, it can be confusing to just do a quick check-in on the platforms. Think of it as an oil change.

Sites like Klout help individuals see their influence rate, but the company still uses its own logarithms and doesn’t break it down simply for brand managers.

Luckily, Mashable recently gave us a list of 9 Ways to Measure Your Social Media Health that can break down the confusion and give a simple, yet somewhat shallow, answer to the big comm-question.

Here’s their list:

1. Share of Voice:The number of mentions of your brand versus competing brands on the social web.

2. Brand Volume: The total number of brand mentions over a given period of time.

3. Engagement: The overall number of times a user talks to your brand on social sites.

4. Interaction Per Post: The number of replies or comments you receive on a given post, tweet, or update.

5. Sentiment Analysis: The process of determining how the people who talk about your brand on social media actually feel about your brand, products, or company.

6. Social Click-Through Rate: The number of times a user clicks on a link to one of your owned web properties shared via social media.

7. Key Influencer Mentions: The number of mentions by users you’ve designated as “key influencers” due to their substantial and loyal social media following.

8. Platform Reach: The number of social platforms that your brand appears on, or the social “reach” across various online networks.

9. Mobile Mentions: The number of mentions of a brand on mobile social sites.

Obviously these number still use so many “key” words and sometimes empty phrases that need comparison and goals to have any value. Honestly, this sounds like a good list for an intern to track, along with some competitor brands (if possible) to what’s up in the market. As always, most of these numbers will be quantitative and many times, qualitative interaction/engagement is where the big bucks are at in terms of brand loyalty and ROI. Most software (like Radian6 and Facebook insights) will give you this information. It’s all about how you interpret it, and even more about what action you take from there!