Measuring the impact of social media is a common topic throughout corporations that are trying to find out the importance of this trend, and the effects it’s having on their business. A recent blog post by Aaron Uhrmacher at Mashable took a look at how he best believes it can be done. He starts off by pointing out that every organization is going to measure their social media success differently because each company has different objectives for their ventures. He pointed out two ways to measure the media.

First, one can use qualitative measurement. In this step, you have to determine what you want to measure. Is it reputations or conversations or something else? Uhrmacher gave these examples:

- Are we currently part of conversations about our product/industry?

- How are we currently talked about versus our competitors?

Then to measure success, we ask whether we were able to:

- Build better relationships with our key audiences?

- Participate in conversations where we hadn’t previously had a voice?

- Move from a running monologue to a meaningful dialogue with customers?

You can also use quantative measurement. This uses tools to help track the traffic to your site and the activity that’s going on when users view your webpage. Sources for this could be: Aide RSS, Google Analytics, and Xinu.

However, the most important part of measuring your ROI from social media is to have in mind from the beginning what you want your media to do. It is vital that you choose what you want to measure so you can determine if you’re reaching those objectives.