ROI is a common surrounding social media – Return on Investment, or bluntly, is this activity worth my money and/or time? You hear talk about this all the time and so you should. Unlike your personal life where your social media motivations and intentions are considerably different, in business it is about making money. Specifically with Facebook there are some many opportunities to connect with your audience, to engage your customers and to solicit feedback but a big question is always what do these Facebook relationships actually mean in terms of your business.

One key element of how a social media campaign is performing revolves around measurement. If you are not looking at how something is performing, it is impossible to know how it is doing. Obvious. With that in mind I’d like to share with you a link that ran on Mashable titled HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Facebook Insights for Small Business. I’d say this is a must read article if you are using Facebook to help promote your business and you are unfamiliar with how to measure your performance. Very well articulated and filled with all kinds of really actionable insights.

In addition to the pointers that the Mashable article makes, I would suggest you take what they are suggesting one step further and put together a spreadsheet that breaks a few of the key measurements that you think are relevant to your business. A few places to measure might be:

  • New Fans
  • Unsubscribed Fans
  • Daily Likes
  • Daily Shares
  • Daily Comments
  • Daily Page Views

The key here is if you are going to measure how you are doing you should measure your performance daily. Over time, with a daily measurement you will gain a very good sense of exactly how well your Facebook Fan Page is performing, what is working, what is not working, and who your most engaged fans are. That of course will allow you to continue to refine your editorial calendar and to create even more relevantly targeted content for your audience. That is a good cycle to be in.

With daily measurement another great benefit is that you will be provided with both the ability and the confidence from which to experiment a bit with your Facebook posts – perhaps to try a new way to launch a product, to promote a special or even to bring in an entirely new element to your strategy such as photos, selected tweets or video. Some of your best discoveries might come with experimentation, but without measurement you might actually miss out on some of your golden moments.