As with any marketing activity you engage in, it's important to know whether your efforts are working, and whether they're advancing your goals. 

The prospective power of using social media to develop and augment your personal and business reputation is high if used the right way to boost your business.

When used appropriately, social media can help people get to better appreciate, to build brand kinship and trust. On a long term, your engagement on social media can generate sales leads and revenue for your business – and ultimately – turn out to be your most important measure.

Some simple methods of measuring the efficiency of your social media and content marketing activities are listed below.

4.1. Measuring content results
Depending on your objectives, there are a number of means to measure the attainment of your content marketing by answering to the following questions:
• What is the number of shares, backlinks and mentions your content received via social channels?
• What kind of traffic to your website is your content generating, and which are the most popular articles?
• What is the number of people who are:
o viewing your videos on YouTube?
o listening to your podcasts?
o checking out your SlideShare presentations?
• Is your content having a definite impact with search engines, and are you progressively ranking higher for the keywords and expressions that your business became known for?
• Are the relevant industry publications, websites and blogs including or featuring your content?
• Essentially, are people subscribing to your content, and is your email subscriber list expanding as a result of your endeavours?

4.2. Measuring social results
Measuring your efficiency related to your social presence can also be done in a number of ways, including:
• the number of followers, connections and likes achieved by your brand across various social channels – and whether these numbers are constantly increasing
• the engagement level with your current and prospective customers
• your ability to reach out to key influencers in your industry and to build relationships with them,
• whether your audience is promoting and/or recommending you on Twitter, Facebook and other channels.

4.3. Measuring your profile and credibility
You can get a fair idea of your credibility by starting to measure your performance bearing in mind the following questions:
• Is your brand's visibility, impact and influence being increased, and is this leading to offline prospects, such as speaking engagements and boardroom presentations around the themes you want to be known for?
• Are you seeing increased PR openings, such as;
o Requests for interviews or quotes from journalists, bloggers, podcasters?
o Are you requested to provide guest blog posts or opinion pieces in significant on and offline publications?

4.4. Choosing the adequate monitoring and measurement tools
There is plenty of (free and paid-for) platforms and tools available to monitor, analyse and measure your social media and content marketing activity. According to Australian Victoria State governmental site, some of the most popular tools are:
Free tools:
• Google Analytics : measure your website and blog traffic
• Twitter Analytics: provides Twitter intelligence
• Facebook Insights: the channels in-built analytics
• Google Alerts: alerts you about any mentions (about you) online
• Talkwalker alerts: alerts you about any mentions online
Tools with paid options:
• Mention: includes mentions online – free with paid options
• Hootsuite: measuring social media analytics – free with paid options
• Tweetreach: get tweet measurement – free with paid options
• Sprout Socia: measure your social media engagement – free trial, then it's paid.
It's important to establish what you're trying to achieve and then implement realistic measures to help direct you towards your goals.
For more details, please check https://www.business.vic.gov.au/marketing-and-sales/eCommerce-and-digital-technology/social-media-for-business/ways-to-measure-your-social-media-presence.

4.5. Experiment and try new things
Some things will work, some others won't, so find what functions for you and your brand – from the kind of content that resonates and gets shared by many, to the frequency of your posts on Twitter and Facebook.
Use your content marketing plan to observe the followings:
• the connections you make
• the relationships you build
• the opportunities that have been created. 

There is no doubt that social media has proven its benefits over the last two decades. For businesses, social media has designed a way to conduct a brand’s messaging to the right people at the right time and hope your brand catches their attention enough for them to be interested, and even loyal throughout their lives.
The main reasons why being on social media is imperative for businesses, and the way in which it can help ensure your brand’s success are as follows:

Faster, Easier Communication
It’s faster now than ever before to contact the right people and it’s definitely becoming easier due to the fact that more people and brands use social media platforms to keep in contact with the people relevant for their business.

Networking & Partnerships
Apart from the simplified lines of communication, there is also the aspect of general availability. Building quality relationships turns out to be a lot easier with the structured communication we get from social media, and developing relationships with key influencers gains significant value for your brand.
Here are some examples of the added value facilitated by these connections:
• Trust from others’ networks and audience partners.
• The achievement of quality backlinks (that offer SEO boost as well as, hopefully, an increase in referral visitors).
• Prospective business openings.

Boost Organic Visibility
There is plenty of potential value to be unravelled through social media, apart from the networking and partnership-produced backlinks.
In addition to the SEO value acquired from adding quality backlinks to your brand’s website, social media also launches relevancy signals and other signals to search engines like Google to ensure popular content is clearly detectable and easy to share.
So, although social media shares don’t function as actual full-value backlinks, the people, brands, and webmasters/marketers that may see your brand’s content through social media, may likely relate to your brand’s content (since it is quality content offering real value), and those backlinks would certainly hold real value.

Increase Website Traffic
Social media is intended to reach different audiences in a friendly, useful, and enjoyable way and direct those potential customers you may not have ever had the chance to engage with earlier, to get acquainted with and try your business.

Customer Feedback
In the world of business, sales and profits, irrespective of what your activity is and who you are marketing and selling to, the focus must always be on the customer.
And success, both digitally and conventionally, is attained by understanding — and providing — the best quality customer service achievable, and doing everything in your power to ensure that your customers and potential customers have the most enjoyable experience with your company.
Social media helps us preserve that reputation by providing us platforms where we can directly interact with our customers in a manner never practiced before. That also means we are offered real customer feedback directly from the source, faster than ever before (and frequently quite harsh, too). Customers can now publicise real feedback in real time, which did not use to happen before, but it is something businesses have attempted to achieve for a long time.

Impress Potential Customers
Maintaining constantly your brand’s respected reputation is the opportunity to make a good impression upon potential customers with the manner you’ve handled other, typically unrelated customer interactions.
People habitually turn to social media and online-review sites to get a sound idea of just who a company truly is, and they rely on that. Just like vendors, consumers are using social media as a tool to help them in making better choices for purchases and decisions in general.

Branding
The influence a brand has and the reputation it built can be substantially boosted and exposed through social media.
Each platform is distinctive in terms of what it does well, the demographics of the users and the type of content (and timing of its publishing) you see posted habitually. Each brand’s messaging should be personalized accordingly.
You can display your brand culture and personality, stick out among the rest for the qualities that make your brand different, attract new, valuable staff and further develop your business even more.

Track Your Competition
Social media channels also give us the opportunity to stay in touch not only with other marketing tactics and practices, but also with the approaches used by direct competitors.
And we can learn a great deal from the other market partners. Our competitors are seeking to do the same things as us (build up and safeguard brand reputation and eventually sell its products/services), so it’s important for us to us monitor and find out ways our business can improve educating and entertaining users, as well as the things our brand does well, and ways of improvement.

User-Generated Content & Crowdsourcing of Ideas
User-generated and crowdsourced content is not only free and unique; it can also be remarkable.
Social media permits us to request this user-generated content, and receive it promptly, but there is more than that.
The majority of the brands will have people post their content with particular hashtags. So, the brand isn’t just receiving the content; the content is actually being posted all over social networks and is equipped with the required hashtags and other “requirements” (which typically comprises following the brand, sharing directly with a certain number of connections, and lots of other things).

Getting the Most Out of Social Media
Each business has its own aims and ways it measures success.
Social media can help accomplish those aims, but the important thing is to stick to the basics and use them in manners that help your brand thrive.
Each brand is distinctive. Let your one sparkle on social media. 

The online reputation, or e-reputation, is the reputation of an enterprise, individual, product, service or any other component on the Internet and digital platforms.
This online reputation is affected by the content distributed by a company, the responses of and relations with web users, activity on social networks, etc.
For e-commerce brands, online reputation is essential, taking into account that it can affect their online store’s reliability and prominence.

Simon Wadsworth, managing partner at Igniyte, an online reputation management agency in the UK, indicates the negative media content as being a reason why brands lose prospective customers.
“When people search for brands online, they tend to search for stamps of credibility,” said Wadsworth. “If they find anything negative, that could end up being a significant amount of leads that the business won’t get from people who are put off from using the service.”
A single adverse media reference can deter users from purchasing a product or service from a company.
By frequently monitoring media references, companies can prevent the potential loss of a considerable amount of new business leads. 

The rise of social media also grants some advantages for businesses. Social media offers the companies the opportunity to have first-hand conversations with customers, according to Shannon Wilkinson, CEO at Reputation Communications, a reputation management agency in New York.
“Social media enables companies to participate in conversations about their products, services, and industries. It also enables them to monitor those conversations to ensure they can be a part of them,” Wilkinson said.
With social media, businesses are able to react and reply quickly to consumers’ queries or remarks, allowing them to participate in a conversation that might not be available on a blog or reviews website. 

Online Reputation Management Helps Businesses Boost Sales
Although sustaining a positive brand reputation appears to be a continuous, considerable process, it can conduct to obvious outcomes.
A quarter of digital marketers (25%) uttered that the main effect of allocating resources to ORM is a growth in sales. 

Find out more about Online Reputation Management here.