I’m a regular over at the Creative Cow, an industry hangout for video and digital folks. Lately there’s been some discussion about how useful social media is for people in our industry. The trouble with almost all social media work is quantifying your success. I mean, it’s nice to have 1,300 Twitter followers (like we do). But what’s that mean, exactly? What’s it worth?

Most metrics given by social media consulting firms are relatively worthless. Retweets? Clicks? Shares? Followers? Impressions? Depending on what you’re doing and what your goals are, these are nice numbers to have, but possibly not worth a lot of your attention.

Some businesses rate their social media effectiveness through new leads, or new sales. Maybe that has some merit, but a big problem with measuring your social media efforts this way is that a lot of the value of social media takes time- sometimes many, many months. It’s far too easy to say “well, that didn’t work” and kill your efforts before they’ve had a chance to take root and work for you.

Another problem, and this is endemic to all forms of marketing and advertising, is that it’s really hard to trace a client’s decision to work with you. I’m talking defining the purchase/decision funnel, for you marketing geeks.

What I mean is, it’s pretty normal for a potential client to hear about you through an ad or a referral, then learn more about you from your website, then read your blog and watch your videos to get a feeling for who you are, and maybe catch a tweet or Facebook post or two along the way. That’s why your marketing needs to be something you think about as an integrated, ongoing multimedia campaign (which I talked about last week). Given all the ways a client could make their decision to contact and ultimately work with you, it’s pretty important to have an active presence in all your marketing, especially your social media efforts.

So, what’s our social media efforts been worth?

In a word, everything. By having an updated, active website, a fresh blog, active Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, LinkedIn, and even the occasional Twitter update, these days about half the work we get comes from people who’ve found us originally through our social media efforts. Even those who find us through other means- including personal referrals- check out our presences to make sure we’re the kind of digital agency they’d like to work with on their projects.