Are You Tracking Your Social Media Marketing Efforts?

Recently I was engaged on a project for a client evaluating their web analytics efforts including the dashboards that they’ve established as well as a thorough overview of their web analytics implementation. One common thing that I’ve routinely noticed is the lack of tracking of Social Media Marketing efforts. Most companies today are engaged in some type of Social Media Marketing whether it is a cable company and customer service through Twitter, Facebook advertising, groups, etc. or Linked In you can and should be tracking your efforts.
I should preface that not everything is quantifiable but there are specific things that you can do to gain a better understanding of how to allocate your time and marketing dollars. For example this particular company is in e-commerce and focuses on promoting specials and deals that they have on a daily basis through their twitter account. They utilize bit.ly which is a great URL shortening service but could make a simple adjustment to have data flow into their web analytics application, in this case Google Analytics. In this case they could utilize the Google URL Builder and create the following URL as an example:
http://www.amazon.com/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=tweet&utm_content=4-13-10&utm_campaign=123-linksys-router
That condenses down to http://amzn.to/cZPbd2 but when you place it within your tweet will carry over the information pertaining to the product, the date of the deal, the source and other valuable information. You could utilize a similar method by appending a CID or other code in Omniture Site Catalyst. You can then use this to make informed business decisions about which of your Social Media Marketing efforts are really paying dividends and which you could consider re-evaluating the tactic or strategy.  As always please feel free to comment and share how you track your Social Media Marketing efforts within your web analytics applications.