Measuring the ROI for social networking can be a little difficult because the returns you’ll get out of networking via social media are not direct and immediate. Chatting with another person on Twitter does not always give you an immediate benefit: however, you are building a relationship which you can leverage in the future.

It is also difficult to track the origin of a purchase or visitor, even although you may have information on the referring web page. How did the visitor first know about your website? What influenced them to subscribe to your newsletter or hire your services?

And how much of all the visible results you see stem from social networking? Did the hours you’ve spent on Facebook lead to a greater readership? How much did your forum posts contribute to your increase in subscribers or links?

It’s not easy to correlate the returns you receive with social networking. Any attempt at measurement will be inevitably incomplete. You can’t pin down every visitor and know how if networking has enhanced the way they feel about your brand.

What you can do is to focus on improving your ROI efficiency, which means improving the rate of benefits you’ll get from the time or money spent networking. It’s okay to have vague or broad goals for social media networking as long as you maximize the value you’ll get when compared to the cost you’ve invested.