Mine is by measuring “cost per brand champion”.

Requires a clear definition of who a brand champion is. (In my case, I use : Any person who recommends http://www.univbrands.com as a learn-by-earning university, resulting in a new lead)

Also requires you to monitor the time you are investing in social media. Time, after all, is money.

What’s your favorite method?

Cool thread, 

@sumitroy how do you measure that? What do you mean by recommending you? Do you use Twilert to monitor mentions?

At the moment I’m looking at traffic from social networks to my site and how many convert to be notified about the launch of my app. I also look at the size of my following on Twitter. If you aren’t doing anything to artificially inflate this (like following loads of people) it provides a useful idea on whether you are having an impact I think. 

But I’m also integrating a lot of other social media metrics into the app itself to allow business owners to track all of this in the one place. 

Klout score is already integrated I’m also writing some code to track mentions in Twitter, share / likes on facebook etc. I’d be interested in seeing how others respond to this and what other types of things people like to look at. 

@thedannorris My apologies for taking so long to respond. Got tied up in a series of assignments.

While I do use Twitter, I’ve found LInkedIn to be the most useful for business.

The definition of who is a “brand champion” for you will depend on your business objective. 

For me, it is anyone who help me generate an enquiry for the service I offer online – a learn-by-earning coaching service to build a sustainable brand. I simply ask “How did you get to hear about Univbrands? Because I would like to thank whoever recommended the service”. 

For each enquiry I get, I send a “thank you book” usually one that is on brand building itself, or where I know it, will be of special interest to the “brand champion”.

I don’t need a great number of leads a year to sustain my business so I can do this without too much trouble.

For clients that need responses in far larger numbers, the principle still works. Even thank you mail/posts to those who further the cause of your brand can easily be counted.

Then you divide the time spent on social media (usually the biggest cost) by leads generated and you know your “cost per brand champion”.

Yes, it does need the discipline of noting the time you are spending on social media each day.

Most people think “Social Media” is free. It’s not. Calculate the opportunity cost of your time and you’ll know the real cost of social media.

(It’s still more cost-efficient than most other ways of generating business. Because your “brand champions” can do the marketing for you.)

opportunity cost! thanks for the reminder… yes, time is money! @sumitroy

@amyhallbiz Thanks for posting. Glad you are getting good results from SME