In my last blog, Measuring Social Media ROI, I looked at how to determine the value of your social media activity. Following on from this, here are some best practices to keep in mind:

1. Define clear goals

You can’t evaluate the return on investment properly if you don’t know what it is you are trying to achieve.

2. Track KPIs overtime to determine trends

If you keep track of your key performance indicators each month you’ll soon see whether any trends are emerging and it will be easy to track them back to their point of origin.

According to an eMarketer report from November 2010 only about 14.7% of businesses actively measure their social media ROI. The majority of businesses put a lot of energy into launching and engaging in a variety of social media activity but not very much effort into measuring their effectiveness in actually producing a return on investment.

Part of the problem is that there really isn’t a standard process for measuring the ROI of social media, and there are those who believe it can’t be done. However there are ways of determining the value of your social media activity: