In order to make social media marketing work to build your brand and establish yourself as an expert, you need to be investing time everyday. Sharing information and engaging your followers, fans, and blog readers on a consistent basis is the key. But how do you know if your social media marketing is working? Are Facebook and Twitter really driving traffic to your site? Is your social strategy really working?

The answer to these questions is, you need to watch and monitor your stats from multiple sites. Simply watching your website traffic alone is not going to be an accurate representation of your overall reach and network. Simply counting the number of friends, followers, and subscribers you have, won’t tell you the quality of your audience. What you really want to measure is the quality of the visitors to your website/blog from your social media channels.

Here are the top four social media metrics you should be tracking:

#1: Network and Audience Size

• Facebook Friends & Fans Count
• Twitter Followers Count
• YouTube Subscribers Count
• RSS Readers/Subscribers Count
• Website Visitors Count

#2: Engagement

• Comments, replies, re-tweets, on all your channels
• Trackbacks and Pings on your blog site
• Referral links from other websites
• Website Visitor Loyalty
• Social Bookmarking

#3: Growth

• Friends count in the Last 30, 60, 90 Days
• Followers count in the Last 30, 60, 90 Days
• Visitors count in the Last 30, 60, 90 Days
• YouTube Subscribers count in the Last 30, 60, 90 Days

#4 Social Media Marketing Funnel (Social Networks => Website Visitors)

Quality of website visitors from your social networks:

• Visitors from social networks count
• How much time did they spend on your site?
• Did these visitors bounce or stick?
• What is the loyalty of these visitors?
• How many pages did they look at?
• What are the popular pages they looked at?

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