I attended a panel about social media to watch three content managers who, together, represented an NFL team, a clothing brand, and a major news publication. They spent about 70 of the 90 minutes talking about engagement, essentially how to get more followers and comments.

As a marketing director who wears many hats — doing everything from web design, to project planning, to user testing, to dashboard building, I’m always thinking about the value of each activity to its bottom line. When you work on a small team without the option of hiring more people, you think really critically about how to spend your time. The choice to take on project A often times means that B can’t happen and really, really great ideas either have to die or wait. There’s simply no room to stay busy on projects without knowing the exact value they provide.

For a person’s entire role to be in charge of social media makes me wonder what these efforts buy. How does having this full time employee influence the number of products sold or memberships added? So I posed that question to the panel: “We’ve talked a lot about engagement and how you grow your audience. How do you know that what you’re posting helps the business meet its greater goals?”

Crickets.

So for those of you who want to spend more time on social media — and I understand why you do — just think really critically about what you want to get out of it first. An hour spent publishing tweets means an hour not doing something else and every employee, no matter what role they play, should know exactly what they contribute to the business or else they won’t know how to get better. In no way am I discouraging the use of social media, but I challenge you to measure more closely the value that it provides. You can’t improve what you don’t measure, so here are a few steps to get the most out of your time:

Overlay social media growth to business outcomes.

So you’re killing it with content, eh? People love to retweet your posts, your growth in fans is shaped like a hockey stick, and April spiked with twice as many followers than the previous month? Well, how does that overlay with number of app downloads, or purchases made? If they don’t correlate, all you’ve done is keep busy, not grow business. And the followers on your page might not be the same people who want to buy your product. So unless your Facebook page makes money itself, make sure that the people you spend time talking to are converting into customers. You can also chart changes in your social media strategy over changes in your company’s NPS score.

Survey superusers.

Who are your loyal customers who buy the most or rank you highest on NPS? Ask them to rate this statement, “I find [this brand]’s Twitter content to be engaging.” on the scale: strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree, N/A. The question itself matters less than the number of superusers who answer “N/A” meaning they bought and love your product but never engaged with your social media to get there. Your social media may be engaging for someone, but not the people who are converting to meaningful customers.

Look at entrance paths.

This is one of my favorite marketing questions to see answered, “How did you hear about us?” Very generally, marketing requires two phases — find potential customers, and convert them to taking action (often times you’ll track a third which is to retain customers or make them into referrers). Having heard about your product through social media means you are largely responsible for generating that business. Great job!

Track your top referring sites through web analytics.

Does 5% of your traffic come from twitter, or 30%? Then, once this audience gets to your site, do they bounce, or complete the purchase? Note that this isn’t entirely a reflection of your own work. A high percentage of visitors due to your super-awesome content could be falling on a landing page that your web designers totally and utterly dropped the ball on (high bounce rate). But knowing that social accounts for a 20% increase of traffic to your product’s page over a couple months means that whatever you changed about your strategy led to more conversions. Once again, great job!

Build a funnel.

Look at the number of active visitors to social against number of unique visitors to website through social against number of goal conversions (the person clicks “purchase”). Where do you see the drop-off? If, for instance, you have lots of Facebook fans, but only a few actually get to your site, consider inserting more links to your product, or provide content that’s relevant to your ideal user. Sorry, those LOLcats are making someone laugh, just not your customer.

Not every social media manager’s job is to be a part-time PhD data analyst (in fact, probably none are), but unless the person creating the actual content knows which works for the business, how do they know what to spend time posting? I’d aim for that content that got five likes and five new purchases over the one that got 100 likes and zero purchases any day. Any of these methods are just a few of which can get you there. Which work best for you?