Through our GROW! e-Book club, we've been getting oodles of questions about how to measure social media--and for good reason.

In the scheme of public relations and the garden industry, social media is still a new medium. New or now, your garden business needs to be participating on the most relevant platforms for your target audience.

But, how can you tell if the time and energy your garden company invests is worth the return on your investment?

We're going to share an easy way to implement step-by-step processes to measure the success of your garden business's social media campaigns.

Measure Before You Move

Launching a public relations campaign(even if it's on social media) takes a lot of time. Your business should set goals for any campaign, but it's difficult to tell if you've met your social media goals if you don't have a system to measure them.

Before you set a plan into action, first decide how you will measure the success of social media in your public relations plan.

The success of your company's social media campaign is dependent on knowing what success looks like for your business.

Measure What Matters

There is unfortunately no one size fits all when it comes to social media measurements. Though, there has been buzz about creating universal standards.

For now, you can create tailored measurements that work best for you.

You've got to measure what matters. Retweets, views, likes, shares, and so on are a great place to start. These numbers should definitely be included in your report. But, you can't stop there.

Determining the ROI (Return on Investment) is really what we're aiming to do. Meaning, the next step is to conclude how these social media numbers feed into your business.

You and your business leaders need to sit in a meeting and agree upon what are the critical factors to success.

In essence, you need to agree upon your key performance indicators (KPI). Then, once you've done this, you can see the correlation between the activity on your social media and the impact on your KPIs.

Key Performance Indicators

The vast majority of businesses use social media as part of their marketing or public relations media plan and KPIs can help you visualize and support the success of your efforts.

Here are a few popular KPIs that could work for your business. See what stands out to you:

• Website Traffic

• Blog Traffic

• Loyal Readers

• Loyal Shoppers

• Page Views per Visit

• Click Through Links

• Subscribers

• Time on Site

• Conversion Rate

• Redeemed Coupons

• Brand Awareness

• Transactions via Social Promotions

• Social Customer Service

It's best to select 1-3 KPIs in the beginning because then you can see what areas social media produced great ROI and where you can improve.

Again, measuring social media is a new science, and crafting a measurement program for your garden business will take time.

Your social media success will depend not only on your ability to track your success, but also, on your adaptability to tweak your social media tactics to continually increase your KPIs!

 Download our e-Book to Learn How to Get the Greatest ROI with Social Media!

Thank you to Volusion for the witty image on measuring social media!