An easy way to tell if social media is having any sort of impact is by checking your analytics program. See if the social media websites in which you are promoting to is referring any sort of traffic to your website. If traffic is the most important metric to you, the more amount of traffic you are receiving from these social media sites (i.e. Digg, YouTube, etc.) the more effective your campaign is.

If you’re using Google Analytics and wish to see exactly the traffic that your promotional efforts are referring you can utilize this simple tool: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578. Just fill out the fields with the appropriate data to generate a tracking code at the end of your URL. Promote the new URL to wherever you wish and when you check your traffic sources you’ll see the data field as the referring traffic source.

You can also monitor comments relating to your submissions. If there are various positive comments relating to a submission that you are implementing than it is a success and vice versa.

There is also the obvious of seeing an increase in sales from the start of your social media campaign.

Lastly, our company, Prime Visibility, has created a social media buzz metric that actually measures your total social media presence in relation to your competition. We take various high level and niche social media websites and calculate the number of links, comments, votes, views, front page submissions, friends (for social networking sites), among other metrics relating to your website and apply a weight to them. If you’re interested in seeing this metric, you can contact me using the e-mail in the source section.
References :
mailto:primevisibility@ymail.com