Does you business use social media and networking?  I suspect that you do or that you are considering it, or you probably wouldn’t be hanging around this blog.

A recent study of businesses who use social media found that, on average, each social media profile you support requires an investment of thirty-two hours each month.  That’s close to one standard work week for you or your employee.  If you are paying your social media person $20 per hour (a bargain basement price), that comes out to $640 per month for every social profile.

Let’s say that you’re just doing the basics in the social media world.  Maybe you have one Twitter profile, a presence on Facebook, network via LinkedIn and keep an updated set of Squidoo lenses; multiply that figure by four.  You’ll arrive at a figure of over $2500 per month.  For a mom and pop operation, that’s big money.  If you’re doing it yourself, that’s lots of time (128 hours).  Either way, “time is money.”

Do you receive enough value in return to at least cover those costs?  Unfortunately, the answer to that question is not always easy to determine.  It is fairly simple to track traffic that results from each of the platforms.  However, is that traffic of real value to you?  How can we determine that value?

For example, we know that the average time on site for traffic generated by a Twitter link is considerably lower than traffic that comes to the site through an organic search engine listing or a PPC ad.  That fact makes sense, because we know that the search engine is sending people who actually initiated the contact when they entered their search terms.

We also know that social media referrals are less likely to convert immediately into customers than are search engine referrals.  So, while we can track referral conversion, we’re likely to be disappointed in the results.  However, don’t rush to the conclusion that your social media investment is not providing a sufficient return on investment.

There are other factors that need to be considered.  I am going to consider just two of those other factors:  Repeated contacts and market awareness.

There is an old rule of thumb in Internet Marketing circles that a typical sale requires seven contacts prior to conversion.  In other words, the business must establish a relationship with the prospect to gain sufficient trust for that prospect to convert.  This is where social media shine: relationship building.  Trust builds over time and in subtle ways.  Using social media to demonstrate your professionalism, commitment to excellence and concern for not only the customer but also the prospect can help in this gradual conversion process.

Genuine participation in social media means more than sending your messages “out there.”  You need to also follow the pertinent conversations of others, as well.  Take advantage of the opportunity to learn what your competitors are doing.  Read what their customers are saying about them and what your customers are saying about you.  Determine what needs exist within your market, needs that you may be able to meet.  In other words, become an active “netizen.”  Trust comes more easily to community leaders.

Tracking and measuring all of this is not a simple process.  The eventual conversion may come to you from a source (medium) that is different from the one where you really won over the prospect.  For example, the customer might end up calling you or buying from your website after seeing your Facebook ad, but that even may have come after a period in which you developed the relationship by means of Squidoo or Twitter.  They might see your ad and think, “Oh yeah, I remember this company.”

Most of the kinds of research in which businesses engage is quantitative.  If we can’t assign it a number, we don’t care about it.  But there is another realm of research:  qualitative.

Qualitative research carefully examines not numeric data, such as we might find in blog comments, tweets and other verbal utterances.  Part of your time and/or financial investment in social media should be in gathering such verbal data and carefully analyzing it, mining it for its underlying meaning.  Only then will you begin to get a more accurate measure of the return on your social networking investment.