Who Says You Can’t Measure ROI on Social Networking?

Let me rephrase that: who says you can’t measure ROI on relationships? Because that’s what we’re really talking about. That’s the white elephant in the room no one wants to put on the scale. Until now. And a friend of mine can show you how to do just that with your twitter activities.

Today’s web analytics programs allow you to test, track and measure pretty much anything you want to measure on the web. And so you should. If social networking is about mixing business with pleasure then you had better make sure time spent is time well spent. Otherwise it’s all fun and games until productivity tanks and you have nothing left to talk about except the state of the economy.

Social networking is really just business networking online. No mystery here. It greases the wheels by allowing us to cultivate trust and credibility with our colleagues before money–or any other currency–changes hands. That’s a good thing. And it’s necessary in a digitized global economy where it’s often tough to know who we’re really doing business with.

Okay and Twitter is damned fun. I smile often at some of the things my tweeps say and do. And it’s validating to have followers who want to read your bs insights. But I never forget why I’m on twitter or who I am to my tweeps. There’s a reason my website URL is in my bio. There’s a reason I share more Internet marketing and copywriting related info on twitter than I do personal tidbits and time wasters (which have their place, they do).

However, if I can’t measure the returns on my time–the impact of my networking efforts here there and everywhere around today’s web 2.0–how do I know it’s worthwhile?
One obvious way to size up the ROI on your twittersations is a low tech method such as using old fashioned spreadsheets for lead generation capture and tracking. The simple exercise of recording this data forces you to think and rethink why you do and say what you do on twitter.

But what about something more number-crunchy like website traffic generation? This has been a conundrum for folks who use desktop clients to access and remain engage with their favourite web 2.0 media. For example, if you use tweetdeck to post to twitter throughout the day, you’re probably also using tweetdeck to share links to interesting content, including links to your own website. Problem is, analytics programs have no way of tracing this referral traffic back to the source, which in this case, would be your tweets.

In The Chatterbox blog Randy Cullom explains the issue of inaccurate traffic source reporting this way:

The long and short of the curse is that clicks on Tweet links from these other applications carry no referrer information in the browser. They’re often not browser based, so there is no referrer. For all intents and purposes these visits will look just like Direct hits in your site stats, meaning you’d have no earthly idea how someone may have found your blog post.

Randy goes on to give a detailed explanation of how to begin tracking traffic that arrives at your website via these handy but difficult to trace “tiny URLs.” And if you don’t want to sift through the nitty gritty details of URL tagging and tracking, just scroll right to the bottom of Randy’s blog post where he outlines just 7 simple steps to begin tracking tweet traffic in minutes.

What I love about Randy’s approach to Internet marketing is that he takes the abstract and boils it down to a business case. Does this get the results I want or doesn’t it? If I tweak X how does that impact Y? What’s the impact on my bottom line? You get the idea.

Even the self proclaimed social media gurus still cling to this romantic notion that you can’t measure returns on relationships. Maybe they just haven’t found the right tools for doing so. Maybe they don’t have the time. Or maybe they don’t want to be the ones to break the news to 176 million Facebook evangelists and 6 million tweeps that if it’s not impacting your bottom line it’s probably just for fun and not much more.