Social Media is going crazy viral as each day passes. Nowadays, it seems that everybody and their mothers use different social networking sites for a variety of purposes. In a show of entrepreneurial spirit, small businesses everywhere started to get on this marketing technique and follow it with such gusto that every article seems to focus on this strategy.

The measurement of your return of investments is important because it gives you an understanding of how effective a particular marketing campaign is. Sadly, 84% of those using social media do not measure ROI.

There are various tools which you can use to measure social media ROI. Here are a few that are beneficial for small businesses:

1. Addictomatic – this is a news aggregator but can also be used to monitor social media. You just need to put in the name of a topic (i.e: name or category of your business) and you’ll receive the latest feeds about that certain topic.
2. Analytic.ly – this tool gives you a customized report on your targeted audience depending on your campaign platform. You can create a customized analytics platform and search keywords and @names for a price. As of press time, the Social Media Command Center and Viral Analytics is priced at $9 a month
3. Backtype – Just type in the url of your website or really any url from your internet marketing efforts and you’ll receive real-time information of the social impact of those sites. You would also be provided a score of your social influence and how much you rank as an influencer.
4. Grader – this is a cornucopia of tools which helps measure and analyzes how effective are the marketing strategies you use for your business.
5. Google Feedburner – this is a free tool from where you can burn feeds from your sites and you would be able to track how many subscribers you have, check how many views and clicks are generated from your sites and even track your podcast downloads.
6. Social Networking Media ROI Calculator – this is a free online tool from DragonSearch which calculates all your social media efforts and its relation to how much you are spending on networking sites.
7. Twitalyzer – this tool starts with a free trial but you would need to subscribe to get automatic updates, full data export, email support and other services. The price for subscription depends on whether you are using the tool as an individual, business or agency. Basically, this tool informs you of your impact score or your percentile rank, which kind of influencer you are, your location, among others.

There are numerous ways you can measure the impact your social marketing efforts have on your business. However, you should not stop there. Analyzing the metrics is just a part of the bigger picture. You would need to incorporate the metrics you got from the monitoring tools you use and see how they affect sales and customer retention and other output goal markers you have.