According to an August 2009 survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education, 84% of social media programs don’t measure return on investment. The good news is that 86% of professionals in a variety fields said that they have adopted social media in some way.

Spredfast is a tool that can automate and simplify the time consuming task of collecting all of your social media metrics. Spredfast is a social media campaign management platform that helps businesses execute their social media messaging and measures the effectiveness of each piece of content.  Here is a screenshot of the automated metrics dashboard on Spredfast:

In order to calculate an ROI, you’ll need to:

1. Start collecting your social media metrics – without these, you can’t calculate “jack”.  Use Spredfast or copy and paste the data from the various social media channels you use to a spreadsheet.
2. Understand the effectiveness of your messaging and the channels you are using. Is your content engaging (meaning are users retweeting, commenting, clicking-thru, etc – see line items under “Engagement” in the screenshot)?  Are you getting more followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook?
3. Measure the time and resources you are spending to run a social media campaign.
4. Calculate the ROI – we’ll go through this in our next blog post (Part Deux).