How to Measure Your Social Media Success

So you started up Facebook and Twitter pages for your small business and you post and tweet regularly. Now what? How do you measure your social media impact to prove that your social media efforts are actually paying off? This is where social media analytics come in. Not only does knowing the numbers help you see how social media is impacting your business, but it can also help you determine the best strategies to reach your customers. This list of tools compiled by Small Biz Trends provides great metrics and reports to give you an idea of how your social media performance is shaping up.

Social Motus: For Facebook and Twitter only, Social Motus gives small businesses the tools to manage their Twitter and Facebook accounts to track targeted conversations, monitor their brand, prioritize conversations, and even track conversion rates to funnel it all into ROI calculations.

Cyfe: Cyfe is an executive dashboard and it is priced for small businesses that have a need to view a lot of Web-based data such as stats on social media, Web traffic, server statistics, email marketing stats, and other relevant business data.

PageViral: Focusing only on Facebook, PageViral provides a single Facebook dashboard with data such as audience analysis, demographics, activity analysis, multi-lingual segmenting and sentiment analysis, decision analysis, content analysis, audience reporting and charting, metrics, and page evaluation.

Moz Analytics: Moz's Analytics does more than just give social metrics and analysis; it ties it together with other facets of marketing. Social activity, link building, guest blogger outreach programs, branding, and other lead generation tactics flow into a single system giving businesses an overall view of how your content works for your business.

Hootsuite: A less in-depth tool than some of the other options, Hootsuite can be used to update statuses and manage social presences on a multitude of social media accounts in addition to delivering basic analytics.

Check out the full post from Small Biz Trends with additional tools to measure your social media efforts here.