It's one thing for a company to set up a Facebook or Twitter page; it's quite another for it to effectively leverage those and other social platforms so that it sees tangible business return. A new study by BlueOcean Market Intelligence measures the social media effectiveness of Fortune 100 companies. The study provides practical metrics for companies doing business on social platforms -- no matter what stage of the process they are in -- as well as real-world examples of what's working.

The BlueOcean Social Effectiveness Index (SEI) 100 is designed to measure business impact by integrating social media analytics with monitoring and multichannel analytics. The study was conducted by capturing conversations on public social media platforms and in online communities, then correlating their impact with business metrics such as revenue and brand value. The study also measured consumer interactions in social media.

[ Are you using social to develop your customer relationships to their fullest potential? See 5 Ways Social Media Makes B2B Sense. ]

Fortune 100 companies were studied and rated on five criteria that BlueOcean's research has shown are strong indicators of social media impact:

1. Share of voice, the number of conversations about a company versus its competitors/market.

2. Engagement rate, the number of interactions divided by the total number of fans multiplied by 100.

3. Customer touch rate, the number of acknowledgements/replies provided by the brand in comparison with the total number of issues raised on Facebook and Twitter.

4. Identification of influencers and advocates, with influencers being the number of individuals or Web entities that have a strong following/readership within the social media channels and advocates defined as the number of individuals who are recommending the brand/products/services on the social channels.

5. Net sentiment, consumer brand perception analysis and voice of the customer opinion mining.

The report states that net sentiment, which the study measures as the Net Promoter Score, is the most significant element of the SEI framework. "Conversations happening on Facebook and Twitter are great sources to use when monitoring customer content," the report read. "In fact, because of their public nature and the way that comments are pushed to friends across the social graph, social comments about a brand are net promotion in action. Irrespective of how much effort a brand spends on its social media initiatives, if the net sentiment of the brand in social media is negative, then it is best to revisit the strategy."

The top 10 companies in the 2012 SEI 100 index are:

-- Honeywell International

-- American International Group

-- Metlife

-- Aetna

-- Chevron

-- Express Scripts Holding

-- Ingram Micro

-- General Electric

-- Oracle

-- Walt Disney

Some Fortune 100 companies, like Fannie Mae, didn't make it onto the index at all for their dearth of social media presence. In all, there were 74 companies included in the index, which was also broken down by sector.

Interestingly, in the tech sector, B2B companies scored higher than companies that are traditionally B2C. For example, Oracle was No. 2 of the ten tech companies on the list (and No. 9 on the index overall), while Apple came in at No. 10.

Where would your company fall on an index of social media effectiveness? Please let us know what you are doing and where your company would land in the comments section below.

Follow Deb Donston-Miller on Twitter at @debdonston.

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