But do you really know the amount of revenue you have generated from Facebook? Do you know how much you have already invested in the network? These are two very important questions you must have the answers to if you want successful results from Facebook and for your fitness business.

Facebook is the number one social media platform used by marketers today. According to the Marketing Sherpa 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report, 84% of social marketers use Facebook in some way. To be a successful part of this 84% you need a way to measure results and analyze data to ensure a positive return on investment. Here are 7 steps to help you do this:

Prior to measuring results you must ascertain your goals. Adopt goals that conform to Facebook and are relevant to your target audience. Ask yourself, if you want to gain awareness using Facebook or enhance current relationships with your customers?

When you have defined your goals then choose a metric to capture your progress. Ask the question, “How will I measure my goals?” If increasing leads is your goal then track the number of generated leads, along with conversion rates and the total value.

Next, be cognizant of your time frame and sales cycle. If your sales cycle is long then you may not immediately see the influence of Facebook marketing. This might require considerable indirect metrics prior to seeing the overall impact. However, if you want to know about traffic metrics, the waiting period is not as long and they’re usually easier to monitor.

Set applicable milestones to collate your Facebook results with your other marketing channels. For example, if comparing Facebook generated leads to other channels, you should institute average lead generated benchmarks for every marketing channel by computing averages over an established time frame or expense level. The important element is to know what your criterion is so it can be used to compare channels to.

When comparing these channels keep in mind creating a Facebook page doesn’t cost money but your time generating leads and engaging customers produces real costs. The page may be free but everything that goes into it is not. Monitoring your investment is just as important as monitoring your results. You need to analyze your return on investment in Facebook to your other channels and decipher which is best.

Offering customers a link to your website is popular for increasing conversion rates and effectively tracks Facebook marketing. By creating a Facebook page for your fitness business you can direct fans to your custom landing page; in other words, to your website. You can also create a custom page within your Facebook page (see instructions on Facebook). Using a dedicated website that is used to send users to can help audit the amount of traffic you’re generating.

Ensuring your website has above par analytics (tracking system) is the best way to monitor prospects coming from Facebook. With this, you can track the movement of your prospects, including their arrival, product viewed, when they depart your site and if they returned 2 days later. This will provide you with accurate conversion rates contributed from Facebook.

Utilize Facebook’s Insights application to gather data on your content and pages. Any Facebook page with 30 or more likes can utilize Insights. This application indulges important data for enhancing your tactics within the network. The following is a list of data Insights provides:

• Page data – traffic, “likes”, comments and other activity
• Content data – impressions, CTR, “likes”, sharing, comments and other data on your content
• Referral data – stats on referral links and traffic from Facebook to your website
• Demographic data – accumulated data on age groups, gender, language preference and location for many of the actions listed above.

It’s real time allowing you to review reports for various time frames.

Create “page tabs’ on your Facebook page. They act as miniature pages and display content such as:

• Image-rich promotions
• Buttons to visit websites
• Embedded videos
• Forms to collect user information

Creating these tabs allows you to measure your Facebook goals. Say, for example, your goal is to obtain more email customers. You can develop a tab that registers and marks them in your database.

I don’t know of any fitness business that doesn’t require continuous monitoring and improvement. Measuring Facebook results will help you improve performance allowing you to adjust goals. One example would be after using Insights data you determined a percentage of your target audience prefers content in a different language. As a result you can post a link directing them to content written in the preferred language.

Another example is in monitoring lead generation and sales. If you are using Facebook Ads and are not seeing a good ROI, but you are generating high leads from engagement on your Facebook page, then you can scale back on your investments in ads and focus on engaging with your customers.