Canadian company Swix offers solutions that can help businesses and agencies track and analyze social media community growth, as well as the results of campaigns or offers.

Swix can answer questions such as:

• How are my social media communities growing?
• How many people are clicking on my offers in social media, on my site or blog, and via email?
• Of those who click, how many take an action (purchase, provide data, etc.)?
• If there are sales tied to my actions or offers, how much money are my social media channels generating, and which ones are generating the most money?
• What’s my ROI based on money generated versus money spent on my campaign?

Swix offers two products: Swix Analytics and the new Swix Social Marketer, currently in beta. The analytics tool lets you track audience sizes for all of your social media properties in one unified dashboard so you can check the health of your community. You can generate analytics reports easily by clicking on the metrics you want to publish — audience growth or engagement numbers — and they are added to a report that appears on a password-protected web page to share with your team, client or other stakeholders.

Social media campaigns usually consist of a landing page or microsite where actions (a purchase or sign-up, for example) can take place. Swix Social Marketer generates unique URLs to help measure the traffic that various social media properties or tools are sending to the landing page and converting the most people per campaign. You can broadcast your offer out to your social network communities using the unique URLs generated by the Swix system for Facebook, websites, RSS feeds, Twitter and email. When people click on the specific link, the system tracks  what they do using cookies, so you know how many people clicked and who converted or took the prescribed action.

While neither of these offerings sounds particularly groundbreaking, they provide the kind of reports that you usually get by cobbling together data, mostly by hand. The cost of Swix Analytics is $9 per month, per brand. So you could start tracking all of a brand’s social media channels including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as its blog’s RSS, and see all the data on one page versus having to go into each channel every week and lifting the numbers for $9 a month. The next brand you want to track would be an additional $9 per month. Swix Social Marketer is currently in beta and free.

Firstly, we should stop worrying about the numbers of friends, fans and followers we gain, or how quickly we gain them. Instead, we should be measuring the value of our followers over time against engagements — both quantitatively (how many?) and qualitatively (what is the sentiment?).

My company Conversify has been using a Follow-to-Following Ratio on Twitter (dividing the number of followers of an account by the number of people being followed) to measure Twitter health. Maintaining a ratio of at least a “1″ or more helps to keep us on track to keep us from “over-following” and helps us illustrate that we’re growing our Twitter following thoughtfully.

It seems like an useful additional number that we might use is an Engagement-to-Follower Ratio. This could track the increase in interactions with one’s following, commensurate to the growth of one’s following. As the number of followers an account has grows, however, can the number of engagements (retweets, @ mentions, etc.) grow at the same rate? And how do we factor in the additional work it takes to maintain or increase engagements?

Using the theories outlined in Julien Smith’s “Follower Hyperinflation” post, it stands to reason that you cannot keep up with growing your following at the same rate over time while having the same access. And you can’t produce enough content, status updates and interactions with your following at the same rate over time to maintain the same engagement-to-follower ratio — it’s just not sustainable.

Given the many variables of growing and managing your followings, here is one more way to frame social media measurement, basing it on Amplification, Conversions and Transactions:

Amplification: How much is your message being spread (or “amplified”) because of your social media interactions? You can benchmark your “social media influence” today with free tools such as SocialMention, Twittergrader and Vitrue’s Social Page Evaluator and paid apps like Radian6 and Attensity360. How do the number of retweets, shares, likes, etc. increase over time? How many more mentions of your message or brand are you seeing online?

Let’s face it: It is far easier to measure to watch the digital trail of pass-along messages (retweets, shares, blog posts references) than the assumptions we make about the reach of traditional advertising. If we advertise in a magazine, why do we trust that the magazine that our ad will reach, be seen and acted upon by other people through offline “pass along” and how do we measure that? We use a formula instead of concrete numbers. When we pay for a television ad campaign, how can we know for sure that the people who see your commercial will not only act on what they see but then tell others about it offline? We can’t, and yet for some reason we trust those things are happening when we’re sold those ad spots.

Conversions: How is your following helping to convert others to becoming fans and eventually customers? We could also call this “Recruitment.” While this number is harder to measure concretely, you can easily run an “experiment” about the willingness of your following to help you build an even bigger following. Simply post a status update to your Fan Page on Facebook asking your existing friends to suggest your Page to their Facebook friends. Pay attention to the increase of fans after that. “Warm” referrals and recommendations have so much more value than those you obtain though cold calling or by paying for, right?

Then go a step further and note who mentions that they did, indeed, suggest your Page. Your social media “superfans” will often comment to let you know they did what you asked, happily. Think about recognizing them for their efforts somehow; perhaps surprise them with a gift. Not an incentive, mind you, but an unexpected “thank you” after the fact. You read more about your social media superfans in “How to Convert Your Facebook Superfans Into Brand Ambassadors.”

Transactions: After converting interested people to to loyal followers, you want them to do something more — some kind of action or transaction: hire, buy, donate, sign a petition, etc. This is an easier number to benchmark and monitor, but it also tends to be the number that is slower to grow, particularly in the beginning. Placing a social ad on Facebook that leads to a shopping cart to buy doesn’t work as well as leading people to your Facebook Page to become a fan, converting them to Superfans and inspiring them to convert others, and then gaining transactions over time.

While time always seems to be “of the essence,” any company that has been in business for a long time will tell you they didn’t grow overnight and that the value of loyal customers far outweighs the one-time customer who responded to an ad but never came back to buy or interact. Repeat customers — and referrals from satisfied customers — are still the “cheapest” marketing we can hope for, but it does take time to cultivate them.

Not everyone has the patience for the cultivation and care social media marketing requires to do it well. They look for short cuts because they are fixated on the wrong numbers and placing value on the wrong things. For those with patience there are rewards, though: There are many case studies out there to prove that social media marketing can be a valuable addition to a company’s marketing mix; it can enhance and amplify their traditional and online marketing efforts and can have a positive impact on a company’s brand, customer service capabilities and, eventually, sales.

What are some concrete examples you have for positive returns on your investment and real value in social media marketing?

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1. Attractions. It’s not quantity but quality that matters in social media. Being able to attract a qualified, quality following is a real social marketing skill. It isn’t about spending huge amounts of money to grab people’s momentary attention. It’s about a slow and steady build of identifying and reaching the right people and then connecting with them for the long term. Did you just spend $250,000 on a funny series of videos and got 23,000 fans on your Facebook Page? Sucker. Most of those people will ignore you from here on out. They may have clicked “Like” during your campaign, but they really don’t care. Are you attracting the right people ,or are they just empty numbers?
2. Participations. Your investment in developing content should be measurable. But what is the value of a comment, or a “like” on your status update? A retweet of your tweet? There can be an algorithmic calculation of the relative or exact reach of the participant, the number of posts from you, the number of overall fans or followers. But is it those numbers that matter here? Facebook Insights offers a “Post Quality” metric, a metric calculated on a rolling seven-day basis that uses the percentage of your fans that engage when you post content to your Page. But how else can you calculate participations? And more importantly, how are you appreciating the value of those who are participating with you in your social channels?
3. Interactions. Do you know how to leverage an online community? Once you get a community going, it seems to take on a life of its own. But good community moderation and management means that you can artfully leverage the interactions and turn them into actions. There is value in those interactions, not just between your customers or potential customers and you, but also those between the customers and potential customers themselves. How are you identifying and measuring these interactions? Have you calculated how much time and money you are saving in the long run because of the more direct and intimate customer service interactions you can have in social channels?
4. Actions. There is a vast difference between impressions and actions. Impressions are nebulous because you really have no idea if someone actually saw your ad. Actions are measurable. Social marketing can drive actions, although it often takes some time and a few steps in between. Don’t be turned off by the time it may take to get to the action. There is a great deal of value in the steps between.
5. Transformations. In marketing, a conversion occurs when a prospective customer  takes the marketer’s intended action (usually when the customer moves from browsing to buying). But in social marketing, there is another kind of conversion that I’m calling the “transformation.” An example of transformation in social marketing: Picture the disgruntled client who vocalizes his or her frustration or displeasure publicly on Twitter or Facebook, a blog, or any other platform that they can access because of the advent of social media tools. Your company has been listening to the chatter in social channels, and a representative from your company addresses their concerns immediately. That person realizes that you are not only listening but that you care and will work to find a solution to their issue. They transform from angry customer to champion of your company’s brand. There is an incredible value in the transformed customer.
6. Transactions. The transaction is the closing interaction, the goal. Keep in mind that you want these transactions to happen more than one time in many cases. And this does not always refer to a monetary transaction i.e. a sale — that’s easy to measure. A transaction could be signing up for something; filling out a survey; referring a friend; sharing information. What are you trying to get people to do? When they do that, a transaction has occurred. How valuable is that to you? And what are you giving your customers in the transaction? A quality product or service? A discount? Additional perks of some kind? How are you communicating to your customers (or friends, fans and followers) that they are more than a sale? How are you showing them that they are a part of a valuable relationship that you are willing to maintain?

None of the above is perfect, and at the moment, I have no concrete definitions to attache to these terms, but we have to start somewhere. I’m eager to hear what you think about these ideas because we’re all can be a part of the process of defining the set of terms we’ll all be using for the next several years to explain what we’re doing, and why.

What terms do you think we should use when measuring social marketing?

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Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

Don’t get me wrong, I measure many things and look at the results with a critical eye. I have analytics to measure my blog traffic, tracking tools for social media metrics, business metrics (finance, marketing, etc.), and much more. What I haven’t done is clearly defined what success as a freelancer looks like for me. Do I want steady growth in blog traffic, and if so, how much? What are my financial goals for individual programs (training, consulting, book sales) and overall for my consulting company? How important are various social media metrics to my business?

The measurement options are almost endless. I could measure hundreds of activities and track everything, but I think that I will take my own advice. I generally advise clients to pick the top three to five items that determine success and focus on those items as the primary success metrics. I will continue to measure much more and use those additional measurements as background research to help determine additional ways to improve my business. I think that it is important to draw this distinction between measurement and success metrics. Success metrics determine whether or not you have been successful while measurements feed into your success metrics and can be used to help understand how and why certain programs are a success or failure.

While I figure out how I plan to measure my success, I’d like to hear from you. How do you measure your success?

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