Participating in social media takes a tremendous amount of investment. Inputs can range in time and scope making it necessary to measure the amount of return that one hopes to gain from tweets, blog posts, and other various forms of content. True success in the digital landscape requires substantial investment of an individual's time and effort.

Benchmarks

Before investing in social media, marketers and storytellers alike must identify concise objectives. These goals will help keep all efforts focused on the tasks at hand and open up opportunities for improvements. Benchmarks allow an individual to identify their target results.

However, before we focus too much time on retweets, likes, comments, subscribers, friends, followers, listeners, and so forth...let's stop for a moment to recognize the value of residual returns on our social media investment.

Here are a few questions to ask as you begin on placing a value on your social media marketing efforts:

• Is your content so good that people actually gained value from reading or sharing?
• Do you place enough of an importance on the value of reciprocity?
• Is social capital a vital component of your strategic efforts?
• Is your network (comprised of friends, followers, etc.) coming back for more?
• Does your audience care about you enough to actually share your content even when there's nothing new to share?

Residual returns on social capital can provide a unique benchmark for measuring the success of your continued investment in social media.