With brick and mortar stores, it’s easy. If a customer comes in and makes a purchase, that’s a sale. While ultimately that’s still the goal, the process of getting to the sale is much more involved now than simply putting an ad in the Yellow Pages. With all the new ways to spread the word, how do you know you’re improving conversion rates from interest to sale and having an impact?

One of the best ways is to track your communication, ideally through an employee working in social media monitoring productivity. Metrics like how many questions have you received through your channels, how many positive/negative interactions have you had and how many thank you’s have you received are valuable, as is how those interactions have grown or changed over time. These twitter tactics and Facebook practices show that you care about your user/customer base.

As well, utilizing link, shortening services such as bit.ly or tinyurl allow you to track the number of clicks over time as well as the source of those links (and where they’ve been shared,) allowing you to track how your customers interact with each other.

So how does this translate to your business growth? It’s all about what people are saying, and if your business is a positive contributor to the social media world (marketing on twitter or Facebook) and considerate of the way your customers access you, word of mouth will take over on its own.

Lou Perseghin is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments. WriterAccess is powered by ideaLaunch, a full service content marketing agency serving hundreds of clients and thousands of writers since 2000.

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