A long time ago, businesses used to measure the success of their website by the number of hits. Of course, we’ve evolved quite a bit to look at a wealth of metrics, including time on site, conversions, ecommerce, clicks-to-conversion, bounce rates and more.

Similarly, until very recently, we used to measure social media’s affects on our business by counting the number of friends/fans we had on our Facebook page and followers of our Tweeter feed.

However, these numbers, by themselves, mean very little to us. Instead, focus on the number of meaningful conversations you have via these medium, the number of comments you have, and so much more.

I use a number of tools to do this – Google Analytics, Radian6, traditional dashboards and a bunch of other widgets and gizmos…

Jay Baer at Convince and Convert writes a great post on measuring social media’s impact on your business. You can check it out here: http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-roi/6-critically-undervalued-social-media-success-metrics/