Activity Metrics:These are metrics associated with counting things such as posts, page views, visitors, active contributors, connections between community members, number of community profiles, rankings, frequency and number comments, etc. Anything that measures activity associated with the social media effort. Select metrics that are relevant to the purpose for social media efforts in the first place.   2. Lead Generation Metrics: These are traditional lead metrics such as cost/lead or community, number of leads/time period, ratio of qualified to non-qualified leads, lead conversion, etc. 3. Customer Engagement/ Relationship Metrics: These metrics are beginning to take an outcome orientation and focus on metrics such as affinity, referral, user generated content, content and connection relevance, new product ideas, new product adoption rate from social media idea vs. traditional sources, etc. 4. ROI Metrics: While it might not be easy to get to a financial ROI, you can begin to assess whether the social media efforts are achieving their results and the value as a result. To do this, you will first need to know which needles you want to move and be able to track the impact of your social media efforts against this target.  So choose relevant metrics that reflect specific business initiatives.  For example, specific business targets might be increasing offline sales by x amount, or increasing demo downloads by a certain percentage within a specific time period, or usage of special promotion offers.  If you can know the value of this additional traffic then you can begin to quantify the value derived from the social media effort.

Nielsen