Social media marketing has been the buzzword for businesses these days.  It is one of the most valuable resources, which is easily accessible to anyone with internet access and can easily bring new clients and customers.

Businesses apply many social media strategies to yield results. But naturally, some strategies are more effective than others. If you’re using social media, you should be measuring it, to see the effectiveness. Thus, measuring the overall success of any social media strategy becomes important. Given below are some steps that would help you to measure the success of your social media strategies effectively.

Your Goals
Any good marketing plan starts with established goals. Thus, it is important that you determine your goals and answer questions, such as, ‘what do I want to achieve? Increased sales? More traffic to website? Improved brand reputation?’  Answering these questions would bring more clarity in your purpose for implementing a social media strategy.

Your Tools
There are ample of tools you can use to measure your social media efforts. These tools will let you know that how well your social media strategies are working. Some of these tools include,

• Facebook Insights: This tool helps you track and analyze demographics, engagement, referrals, click-throughs, and more for your Facebook pages.
• FeedBurner: FeedBurner helps you manage your blog subscriptions in the most effective manner. Using this tool, you can determine that which of your blog posts are liked most by the readers. Also, you can easily drill down on your subscriber demographics.
• HootSuite: It is a very important tool that helps you manage your one or more Twitter accounts and also integrate your other social media tools and blogs with Twitter.
• Klout: This tool tells you how many people you influence, how much you influence them, and the influence of your network across your social media platforms.

Latest Trends in Social Media
Remember that social media is a fast changing field. So, it gets really important for you to be up-to-date on all the latest trends in social media. Various sources that you can use to stay informed, include, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Socialmedia.biz, and the list goes on.

All in all, social media marketing can be lucrative for any business. It is a great tool which you can utilize to stay ahead of your competitors. If you’re participating in social media, you really need to understand how you are doing. Is your content having the impact you want? Are you meeting your company’s goals with social media? This is why monitoring and measuring your social media activities is so crucial – you need reliable and consistent analytics that help you track your success on channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube.