Are you constantly checking facebook and twitter to see who is mentioning your company?  Have you hired specific social media account managers to help boost your reputaion?  Are you still trying to measure your social media? 

To be successful at social media, you have to decide what success means. A social media program without a goal is like professional football without a Super Bowl. Having a goal on the horizon gives shape to your efforts and — more importantly — let’s you know when (and if) it’s OK to pop the champagne. By failing to set specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, time-bound goals, businesses are denying themselves the ability to track their performance.

Clay Hebert suggests customers should try to define their “champagne moment” in a single sentence, perhaps by using this simple formula:

“Increase/decrease Metric X by Y amount during Z amount of time.”

Once you have a goal, there are a few key steps to take to measure the results of your efforts against that goal.

• Build a firm baseline of key performance indicators that you can measure against.
• Look for ways to build tracking into everything you do.
• Use promo codes for discounts, referral fields on signup forms or tracking codes in URLs.
• Some monitoring tools Hebert recommends include Cyfe, Google Analytics, Awe.sm, Argyle Social and Row Feeder.

If your business takes a lot of its orders via phone, like a few of my clients, Hebert recommends using a service called Grasshopper to set up unique phone lines for each channel you have a presence on — one number for your blog, one for your Facebook page, etc. — that all redirect to your main phone system. Grasshopper will allow you to track how many calls started with each channel’s phone number, allowing you to see how many calls are being driven by each channel.

By defining your goals at the outset, setting baselines and tracking your results, you’ll be able to see whether you’re on the right track — or if you need to make changes.

How are you defining social media success? What does your social media “champagne moment” look like?