talk about five social media metrics that you can actually measure. With them by your

side, instead of just tweeting or Facebooking out and wondering what's happening, you'll

soon be able to understand the fruits of your social labor. First on our list: Take a look

at your sentiment ratios. In other words, is the conversation skewing positive, negative,

or neutral when it comes to your brand? To do this, you can use a listening tool or you

can go through and count manually. But however you do it, it's always good to trend how positive

conversations are going, how negative conversations are going and that you're responding accordingly.

Metric number two: Always pay attention to your engagement levels. For example, how many

retweets, comments, likes and shares are you getting with your content? This is really

important because you can see how often and how people are interacting with your content,

which'll help you identify your most popular topics. Number three, and this is more of

a measure of direct response, but always take a look at referral traffic, specifically coming

from social media channels. You can gauge this through your analytics tools, such as

Google Analytics, and when you do, you'll be able to see it trending month over month,

or week over week, and get an idea of how much traffic is coming directly to your site

from your social efforts. Fourthly, take a look at reach. With Facebook Insights, this

is something that you can get right from that tool, but in general, you want to see how

far your content or your social media mentions are going. In other words, you want to see

how many impressions or eyeballs are coming to the specific pieces of content you're sharing

through your social media. Last and probably most obviously, you'll want to take a look

at your community size. While engagement and reach and virality are all very, very important,

you always need to make sure that you're adding followers and adding likes to your social

profiles. So just keep tabs on these, trend their growth patterns month over month, it

will help you gauge your process overall. Keep these five metrics in mind as a barometer

to gauge the health of your social media campaigns. Have any questions? Just leave me a comment

in the box below and I'll get right back to you. From me to you, happy selling!