You can look at several elements when measuring the success of your social media efforts. What you measure is going to depend on your overall marketing goals. Do you want to push sales, drive engagement, or increase awareness? Whatever your success metrics are, here are some others to consider as well:

1. Content Consumption – If you have a blog, an effective way to measure engagement is to monitor who is reading your blog, where they are coming from and what content they are reading. You can run web analytic reports that will show you the most popular content on your site or blog. This data will also show how much time the reader spent on a particular page, where the reader came from, and also the bounce rate (percent of visitors who left your site after visiting a particular page).
2. Content Contribution – If you have a blog or wiki that allows comments, a quick and easy metric is monitoring the number of visitors who are interacting with your content.
3. Social Bookmarking – Who is adding your site, article or blog posts to sites like Delicious, Reddit, and Stumbleupon? There are a couple of methods you can use to look at this metric. You can use your web analytics tool and run a click map report and see how many web visitors are clicking on the social bookmarking icons. Or, you can simply create profiles in each of the bookmarking sites and search for your URLs.
4. Subscribing to an RSS feed – This allows you to measure how many of your readers are subscribing to your RSS feeds.
5. Emailing posts – If you allow your blog postings to be emailed to others, you can use a blog platform tool (such as WordPress) to see how many emails are sent through your form.
6. Who is talking about you – There are a few ways you can measure this, but, it’s not an exact science. Again, with WordPress, you can see which sites are linking to your site. This function is clearly located on the dashboard so you can see this as soon as you log in. You can also use a blog search engine, such as Technorati, and search your domain. Lastly, you can always use the old SEO trick by searching for your domain in Google, Yahoo and MSN with the following: link:http://www.yourwebsite.com. These numbers will never exactly match, but they are indicators of who is talking about you, or minimally, who is linking to your site.
7. Profile Engagement – Perhaps you don’t have a blog, but you have a profile on Myspace, Facebook, or Mybloglog. You can apply the same metrics mentioned above, as well as monitor the number of friends that you have, total profile visits, etc. Each social networking site offers some type of vitality metric to see what’s going on in your communities.

Before you engage with social media, you may want to assign monetary values to your metrics, especially if your end goal does not include revenue conversions. This is where the task becomes a bit challenging, but it’s key if you want to assign an ROI to your social media marketing efforts.

Insipration: Content from Michael Brita Senior Marketing Manager Yahoo!