What is the best way to tack results with social media marketing?

[Robert]

How does a business owner track their results? Are there tools or software that can show true return on investment numbers to meashure their social media? Example: Google Analytics is one great tool to identify online traffic by impeding a code within your website or blog. What other tools are on the market?

[Steve]

I use Google Analytics as a baseline approach. It gives you a lot of information. The other one I like is Quantcast.com. It gives me all sorts of weird information, such as 9% of my visitors are African American. How they arrive at that number I have no idea.

A better answer to your question is here though:
http://mashable.com/2009/04/19/social-media-analytics/

The basic answer is to Optimize your existing analytics software using plugins or built in tools.

[George Smith]

If you would like to make new contacts, expand your marketing network, promote your biz op and earn a residual income in a social and business network, you need to go here:

http://swom.com/?r=41633

It is free to sign up. I look forward to networking with you.

[Isaac Marcum]

Here is a fun trick:

Posting on social networking site, post on forums, blogs, and so on it can be hard to understand how many people have actually seen the site. There is no way to gage how it's been seen.

One way to fix this is by linking on the site to an image on your website server. by adding that image every time someone views the page it will show up on your analytics. You can even see which page.

Adding this technique to Google Analytics will help to really see the results.