Enterprise use of social networking data to improve productivity a long way off, according to Gartner.

Just 25 per cent of advertisers will use social networking data to improve performance and productivity by 2015, according to analyst firm Gartner. But social media has been around for some time now with marketers continualy experimenting with the medium. So why have they failed to make use of the information they are acquiring with such campaigns?

Most businesses are still a long way from using social networks to analyse the information gathered through a campaign.

Users resent knowing that automated tools analyse their behaviour, according to Gartner, which recommends that companies secure the buy-in of the people they hope to include in the analysis.

Furthermore, social networking and email capabilities could soon merge into a single service.

“Email will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering, while social networks will develop richer email capabilities,” said Gartner analyst Matt Cain.

This could be another way to track information, but Gartner says its a few years off yet.

The biggest dilemma for social media marketers is tracking ROI.

In the absence of any accepted metrics, businesses still need to be able to determine whether or not a social media program is tempting sales making an impact.

Here are a few ways to consider measuring social media ROI:

First, determine what you want to measure, whether it’s corporate reputation, conversations or customer relationships. These objectives require a more qualitative measurement approach, so start by asking some questions. For example, if the objective is measure ROI for conversations, create a benchmark:

- Are we currently part of conversations about our product/industry?

- How are we currently talked about versus our competitors?

Then to measure success, we ask whether we were able to:

- Build better relationships with our key audiences?

- Participate in conversations where we hadn’t previously had a voice?

- Move from a running monologue to a meaningful dialogue with customers?

There are companies that offer services to assist with this kind of measurement, which requires a great deal of human analysis on top of the automated results to appropriately assess the tonality and brand positioning across various social media platforms.

If the goal is to measure traffic, sales or SEO ranking, we can take a more quantitative approach. There are some free tools that can help with this type of measurement, including:

-  AideRSS allows you to enter a feed URL and returns statistics about its posts, including which are the most popular based on how many times they are shared on a variety of social networking sites (Google (Google), Digg (Digg), Del.icio.us).

-  Google Analytics (Google Analytics) and Feedburner are essential, free tools to help analyze your company’s blog traffic, subscriber count, keyword optimization and additional trends.

-  Xinu is a handy website where you can type in a URL and receive a load of useful statistics ranging from search engine optimization (SEO) to social bookmarking and more.

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