While companies are starting to adopt Social Media for online marketing campaigns, and even letting employees participate, the question of ROI (Return on Investment) arises, along with doubts about what metrics to measure. How do you know how effective your social media campaigns are if you’re not measuring any metrics, let alone an overall ROI? Below, we discuss ten important Social Metrics for companies.

According to 2009 Mzinga & Babson Executive Education study, over 80% of professionals do not measure ROI for their company’s social media programs. Granted, Social Metrics and their measurement techniques are relatively new, and this might account for the lag in tracking. However, there are some organizations measuring social metrics, which enables them to eventually measure ROI. Marketing Sherpa’s survey of 2,000+ marketers shows the following three social metrics at the top of what’s being measured:

1. Visitors and sources of traffic
2. Network size (followers, fans, members)
3. Quantity of commentary about brand or product

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Social networking is one of the fastest-growing activities among mobile users around the world. And as one of the primary ways mobile users communicate with one another, it is proving a significant driver of Internet usage on mobile devices.

eMarketer predicts the number of mobile users accessing social networks from their mobile devices will reach 607.5 million worldwide by 2013, representing 43% of global mobile Internet users. In the US, mobile social networkers will total 56.2 million by 2013, accounting for 45% of the mobile Internet user population.

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Amid the endless pronouncements about social media — often shortened to “social” these days by consultants trying to sound like they know what they are talking about — is the reality that social media is not a solution, or a sure bet.

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(CNN) — Sure, everyone knows that Oprah, Shaq and Ashton Kutcher are huge on Twitter. They’re famous — they should be huge on Twitter.

But Heather Armstrong? John Dickerson? Adventure Girl? These people can stroll unmolested through a paparazzi convention, and yet each has more than 1.2 million Twitter followers — enough to rank them in the top 200 overall and more than Stephen Colbert, Snoop Dogg or Paris Hilton.

To thrive on the popular micro-blogging site, celebrity isn’t always enough. You also must have something to say.

“You can’t be Moses shouting down the mountain on Twitter,” says Brandon Mendelson, a blogger who has amassed almost a million Twitter followers. “You need to be that friend everyone wants to hang out with.”

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How many of these are you utilizing?

10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs

Whether your company is just starting out, just starting to turn a profit or already on the verge of an acquisition, as an entrepreneur you’ll be constantly evaluating the tools that will help get your business to the next stage.

Even if the ink on the business plan isn’t dry yet, you want to be armed with the social media tools that will play an important role in company communication, product and brand promotions, and business development for your startup. Some of the tools in this list will be familiar, but it’s worth taking a moment to reframe how they might become power tools in a business context.

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The Science of Retweets on Twitter | Brian Solis – PR 2.0

Zarrella recently debuted TweetPsych, a sophisticated system that uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. He also adapted the service to analyze a site URL and the content on that page to create a list of the 50 Twitter users who’s profiles are psychologically aligned with the site you provided. It’s a fascinating service for those actively seeking to expand their contextual networks.

One of the most actively discussed aspects of Twitter is the art and science of retweets. Retweets, in my opinion, are one of the most sincere forms of recognition and validation, empowering users to pay it forward through the recognition of noteworthy content. According to Dan, retweets also serve as the foundation for assessing the qualities of viral content, “You don’t spread ideas just because they are “good;” you spread them because of some other trigger or set of triggers has been pulled in your brain. We can now compare millions of viral ideas to uncover the building blocks of contagiousness.”

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Twitter: A Valuable Marketing Tool?
By Laura Lake, About.com

I hear the debate all the time, and no I’m not talking about the Presidential debate – I’m referring to Twitter.

Should we consider Twitter to be a marketing tool or is it just for people who have a lot of time on their hands and the need to jibber-jabber all day long?

I will be honest, I was an early adopter of Twitter and then I walked away from it I couldn’t see the value, recently my viewpoint has changed.

Think of Twitter as a means to get instant public messages out to your audience, whether it is an audience of colleagues or potential customers.

Twitter is becoming an increasingly important platform for online communication and, yes, conversation. TechCrunch reported that Twitter has more than 1 million users and approximately 3 million messages are posted daily.

How can we use Twitter as a marketing tool?

Good question. Let me see if I can help.

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What the heck is social media marketing? – Redwood Times

By Sean Connors

Looking for a way to better expose your product offerings and services in this challenging economy? Use the power of social media marketing – for free!

If you have a business, then you should already know by now that you should at least have a small website for you business. Face it – some demographics don’t even know what a “phone book” is anymore, and others find it easier to Google your business than to thumb though a printed book. If all you have is a website for your business, however, you have not yet fully entered the 21st century. To do that, you need to understand how your business website is or could be networked with folks using the Internet.

Traditionally, promoting your site on the web would be just a matter of understanding how site design interfaces with organic/natural listings in the top search engines (with enough quality links back to your site to trump your competitors), and then maybe running some Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns on services such as Google AdWords, etc. That is, most of what you could do was to tweak your site copy and other aspects of site content such as meta title, description and keyword tags to compete with your competitors for “natural” listings and possibly pay for position via PPC advertising.

That may have suited your needs for online marketing in the past, but times have changed folks! There is now a new wave of marking that is much easier and more powerful than the old school optimization for search engines. It’s called social media marketing.

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Small-business owners are not making the trek to social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook, but are slowly dipping their toes into Internet waters, according to a new Citibank/GfK Roper survey.

The study found 76 percent of small-business owners polled were not using social media or finding it helpful in generating business leads during the last year, and 86 percent said they did not use such sites to get advice or information.

“Our survey suggests that small-business owners are still feeling their way into social media, particularly when it comes to using these tools to grow their businesses,” said Maria Veltre, executive vice president of Citi’s Small Business Segment. “While social media can provide additional channels to network and help grow a business, many small businesses may not have the manpower or the time required take advantage of them.”

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