Social media may be one of the hottest marketing tools out there right now, but its results can’t be tracked like traditional media. Not only do you need to track the effectiveness of your own blogs, podcasts, and social networking efforts, but you should also measure your presence on other social media outlets. 
Before you begin to measure your social media results, you need to know what your objectives are. Here are some quick tips:
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Are your efforts helping your customer relationships? Social media builds relationships with customers. Gather email addresses from visitors to your blog and then create an email survey to capture their feelings towards your brand.
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Find out where you rank. The higher you are ranked when it comes to your blog, the more influence you begin to have among consumers. Use a ranking system, such as Technorati, to find out where your social media efforts rank among your competitors’.
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Concentrate on the financial measurements. Assign a unique URL to links and it becomes easy to measure the traffic to your blog trough web analytic tools. Once you know where people are coming from you can begin to measure what is important to you – whether it be total number of visitors, length of visit, where they came from, cost per click through, or cost per sale/lead.
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Keep a pulse on the ‘buzz.’ Visit Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ Brand Pulse to see the topics and subjects that people are talking about in their social media efforts. Trend graphs display the buzz generated by any given topic or the comparison of buzz across a set of topics. It’s a great way to monitor your brand and your competition.
Be sure to listen to what people are saying. It’s not just about numbers and hits. It’s an opportunity to gain valuable insight into your consumers’ opinions, experiences and purchase decisions.
