You would think it would be easy to tell whether your social network marketing plan was working or not. After all, you’ve either got hundreds of new contacts and a landslide of Internet orders or you don’t… right?

It’s not really that simple.

New revenue, customers, and contacts are the simplest way to gauge your progress, but the problem is they tend to show up relatively late in the game. It’s very possible to be making progress long before it shows up in your bank balance, or your e-mail list, which is why it’s so important to pay attention to some other relevant indicators before you decide to pour a lot more money into your social networking plan… or ditch it altogether.

Here are a few ways to get – and use – the right metrics for social media:

Put technology on your side. By all means, take advantage of the software and tools available for tracking hits to your website, registering traffic on your blog, finding out how people are coming to you, and so on. The more information you have, the more informed your future choices and investments will be. If you can’t tell where customers are coming from, or why, then how will you know which parts of your social networking plan to keep pouring time and money into?

Look at the situation from all angles. That doesn’t mean you can stop at simply looking at before and after sales numbers. You need a big picture perspective. For example, it would be easy to see a growing number of Twitter followers, and an increase in online sales, and conclude that things are going well. They might be, but it also could be a case of cannibalizing your offline sales by driving buyers online for lower prices, or enticing new customers with price cuts that you can’t sustain over the long term. These would be extreme examples, of course, but the point to remember is that you need to keep a close eye on how things are really going… not just the numbers of “friends” and sales you have.

Know when to pull the plug. As we hope you’ve gathered by now, nearly every business can use some level of social network marketing. That’s not to say that every business needs a ton of it, though, or that every online marketing firm you can hire is worth the expense. Keep tabs on your social network marketing plan and if it looks like things aren’t working out the way they should, don’t be afraid to pull back and go smaller – or even start over. The process takes time, but it only works if you do it the right way, so be ruthless in your desire to stop throwing time and money at activities that aren’t ever going to pay dividends.

Build and keep building. In the end, social networking always comes down to widening your net and broadening your reach. To that end, start with quality content and strong profiles, and then keep adding to them. I can promise you that, eventually, the payoff in your ability to reach potential customers and industry peers – instantly and with the full weight of a strong social networking profile – will be well worth the wait and effort.

When we talk about “budgeting” for social network marketing, realize that there are actually two things that can be invested: time or money. For smaller companies, or those who are brand-new to social media in general, marketing through Facebook, Twitter, and others  might be a largely “sweat equity” endeavor; they either don’t have the dollars to throw at bringing new business in through these avenues, or aren’t convinced enough of the potential benefits just yet to part with hard currency.

Of course, there’s also the other end of the spectrum: large companies, or the Internet marketing savvy, who will devote large portions of their budget to having social networking experts help them to tweak and optimize their campaigns. Usually, this involves a combination of in-house staff and outside expertise working together, with the expenses making up a healthy part of the profit and loss sheet.

Most businesses, naturally, will fall somewhere between. They’re doing most of the day-to-day work on their social networking profiles in-house, or even by the owner themselves, but might seek some guidance in setting up their accounts, crafting the right tone and message, and keeping things on track. Social network marketing is an area where expertise can help, but it’s also a field where you can do a lot of the legwork yourself.

When trying to decide how to budget your social networking dollars and time, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Always choose quality over quantity. Like search engine optimization, social network marketing is one of those areas where people often try to do too much at once – sacrificing quality to produce a high volume of online content. This is a losing approach every single time: no one wants to look at your profile, much less read your blog posts or view your videos, if they aren’t at least a little bit insightful or entertaining. Regardless of whether you are generating material in-house or hiring creative help, be sure that what you’re putting online is worth a potential customer’s attention.

Plan for the long haul. Except in rare cases, setting up your social profiles isn’t something that’s going to pay you back in a month or two. By adding content and material, as well as making new contacts, what you’re really doing is building a bigger lever. It’s not going to show up on the bottom line very much in the short term, but once your plan is well underway and working, it can create a steady flow of new business, professional contacts, and even new employees that won’t take a huge effort to keep coming in.

Increase your budget slowly. Whether it’s time or currency you are pouring in, add a little bit at a time. That way, you won’t become frustrated if the results don’t come right away. Likewise, a small but realistic plan is easier to stick to – and a whole lot more effective – than one you can’t keep up with on a busy schedule or during a tough fiscal month.

Learn to ask good questions. At some point, one of two things is bound to happen with your social network marketing: either you’ll give up without seeing a profit, or your efforts will start to be successful and you’ll look into getting outside help. Once marketers get a whiff of what’s possible with sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, they start to look for ways to optimize what they’re doing. What they usually find, however, is that it can be a pretty complicated area once you break into the competitive circles – that’s usually when they start looking for hired guns.

Unfortunately, like all new Internet disciplines, social networking has attracted its fair share of “experts” who promise a lot but don’t do much. The best way to protect yourself from these types is by knowing enough about the basics to have realistic expectations, and then asking lots and lots of good questions. If you’re satisfied with the answers, go ahead and try somebody out. But if you aren’t comfortable with them, trust your gut and move on – because social network marketing takes a long time, choosing the wrong partner usually means suffering through months of wasted time and invoices before you find the truth.

By Nicole Fletcher

I joined Twitter a while back expecting miracles. This of course was well before I jumped head first into my social media marketing career, but regardless, that’s where most people start. I found my friends through the search feature and followed them. They followed me back. I tweeted…then I stopped. Period, paragraph. My twitter account was left dusty and alone for many moons.

Fast forward to about a year ago when it became evident to me how important  personal branding is to someone like me and someone like anyone, if you want my personal opinion. I brushed the metaphorical cyber dust off my twitter account and began my journey to figure out this strange social network they call the ‘micro blogger’. I had started a regular sized blog a while back but was unhappy with myself and with it for a number of reasons. I switched it over to Tumblr to start anew and set it up to auto post to both my facebook wall and twitter account. I’ll tell you, the facebook integration was a big step for me as I hate to inundate my non social media savvy friends with news about the latest trending twitter topics, Google acquisitions and all the other ‘nerdy’ things I post about – but I did it anyway and so should you – everyone needs to learn.

Then I hit the big blogs out there to learn some more about my mission. I scoured the web for tips and tricks of the trade. Everything seemed obvious. Follow people who are in yours or a related industry. Retweet posts you find interesting or insightful. Communicate with people who are already talking about what you’re thinking about. Like I said, obvious. Then I realized that despite my lackluster reaction, I hadn’t really done any of these things before. I felt strange tweeting at people I didn’t know out of the blue and I think that’s a big problem people encounter. It’s like walking up to a stranger in a bar…but much less intimidating – so do it. Tweeters LOVE to be tweeted at – it’ll be the easiest friend you ever made.

Moving on, I started following people in social media, SEO, graphic design, marketing, etc and following people they follow and so on and so forth. Gradually people started to follow me back, sending me direct messages thanking me for the follow. I thought I should do the same and so I did and so should you. Social Media is all about forming relationships so take the time to form them. You won’t be sorry. In addition to growing my, as they say, personal brand, with followers in the  triple digits (big deal, I know), I found I was learning more than I ever expected. News articles were more readily accessible than ever before and in real time. Before I knew it, I was the one telling my friends about events that had literally just taken place because someone I follow was there tweeting about it. I now know about the latest developments in tech, social media and weather, not to mention coupons, deals and social events in San Diego and beyond as soon as they happen… and I like that.

I won’t lie to you and say that if you go onto twitter once a week or even once a day you’ll blow up your followers in no time. It doesn’t work like that. It can honestly be a full time job – ask any solid blogger who posts original content on a daily basis. I’m not there yet but I’m working on it. In the mean time, start out slow. Follow people and things you like whether they’re related to your work, hobbies or life. Thank tweeters for following you but be sincere – people hate spammers. Take the time to engage your audience or your prospective audience – they’ll write back I promise. That’s not to say that Lady Gaga is going to tweet at you tomorrow…but one day a big fish will and I can speak from personal experience, it’s like winning the lottery. In the mean time, learn from this tool – read articles you never would have come across, comment, retweet, post original content and immerse yourself and your business into the twitverse….it’s how I got my job after all..but that’s another blog post.

As online marketing terms and phrases go, “synergy” is probably one of the most overused. In fact, those of us in the industry hear it so much that sometimes tends to lose its meaning.

Despite that fact, however, it really is the best word to describe what usually happens when social network marketing starts to work. It’s never easy to pinpoint any one tactic or moment; rather, you suddenly find that clusters of new clients and colleagues start coming at you from all angles. What seems to be a useless exercise just a few weeks or months ago suddenly starts yielding monstrous results. You reach a “tipping point” where all of your efforts start to pay off.

How long it takes to reach this point depends largely on you, your business, and what kind of time and effort you put into social network marketing. The easiest way to speed things up, though, is by using all of your tools in concert. In other words, never rely only on Facebook to generate leads, or Twitter to get your message out – instead, be sure that each profile is linked to the others, with a consistent message coming through every blog post, social update, or video you put out into the virtual world.

Additionally, don’t just limit your efforts to what’s online, or even considered “social media.” There’s no reason your print ads can’t mention your Facebook fan page; likewise, Twitter can be a great avenue for broadcasting the sale you’ll be having at your physical retail location in a couple of weeks. Naturally, as we’ve mentioned all along, you’ll want to keep these outright promotions relatively rare when working on social networking sites, but that doesn’t mean you have to abandon them altogether.

Just as you would want the sales and marketing divisions of your company working closely together, so too should your social networking profiles be building on top of each other in your other online and off-line promotional efforts. Take a step back once in a while and check whether all the parts of your marketing advertising are moving in the same direction; synergy might get talked about too much, but that’s only because it’s so beautiful when it happens.