Social media channels have become an important tool in the marketing arsenal and it’s important to measure its impact, says Veronica Fielding, president of Digital Brand Expressions. With the increased attention on using social media for brand awareness, marketers are beginning to realize they need to measure social media’s impact, especially during a recession when budgets are tight.

“The newest analytic tools and applications can help track the number of unique users, referring site statistics, and the ratio of blog comments on your social media outposts,” explains Deepa Maran, Group Manager of Technical Services at Digital Brand Expressions and a Google Analytics Qualified Individual. “Those who are using LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. to make their brands more visible in the social media space need to define what success will look like and then set up ways to measure their success.”

Many of the basic web analytics tools available today are free or low cost. They not only track and monitor traffic but can also measure social media’s impact – how people are hearing about your business, which efforts are bringing in the most traffic (blogs, forums), and whether you are attracting the right people.

For example, Omniture has a new application that measures the popularity and success of Facebook applications. And, Google Analytics has begun providing flexible segmentation definitions, which provide in-depth insight into behaviors (customer engagements, conversions, etc.). Google Analytics also helps track the interactions with social media widgets and video components.

“The most successful organizations are adopting tools and methodologies that help them listen to and learn from customers and prospects,”” says Ms. Maran. “We recommend that all organizations using social media to harness brand awareness set up at least some basic monitoring to analyze what’s working and what’s not”.

Digital Brand Expressions offers these tips for measuring social media:

• Define metrics for measuring your social media monitoring effectiveness.
• Regularly measure the ROI of your social media marketing efforts. Size does not matter when it comes to measuring social media return on investment. With social media marketing, the two core metrics are influence and engagement.
• Set up specific campaigns and event tracking for social media – choose analytics software that can track specific events.
• Use event tracking to follow the user engagement with the social media elements (videos, any social media applications, etc.) that are in a site. Tracking fans, followers, etc. over time shows how interest is growing and helps you refresh your content and share it through other channels as interest grows.
• Learn more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site so you can write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting websites.
• Determine which of your social media efforts bring more traffic and make a visitor more likely to use your product/service.
• Research plug-ins and tools like Bit.ly, xinureturns, PostRank, and SocialToo, which can supply data about your social media outposts.
• Aggregate your analytics – record all your information in one area or build a spreadsheet for analyzing your numbers. Use your social media analytics to engage your audience.

Digital Brand Expressions specializes in helping brands of all sizes to be found on the Web through customized solutions that typically include search engine optimization, paid search, and social media marketing for F1000 and middle market companies and provides social media educational tools for individuals.