I always tell my clients that social media is a necessary and integral part of their publicity and marketing campaign. So how can you be MORE effective with your strategy?

Get the TOOLS! There are many great tools for measuring social media results. Export.ly helps you analyze your Facebook fan page, Twitter audience and more through downloading customizable Excel spreadsheets. RowFeeder is an inexpensive way to monitor what people are saying about your brand. If you want to figure out how often your tweets are being shared and by whom, check outTweetReach. Other tools include Facebook Insights, Klout, Social Mention, Hootsuite and social media metric plugins for Google Analytics. Remember that the tools have to meet the objective of the campaign, not the other way around.

You must ENGAGE! This word might be over-used, but it’s really what your social media efforts are all about—engaging with your audience. Ultimately you want sales, of course, but in social media, engagement is the means to increasing reach. By posting content that resonates with your target audience (and this assumes that you know who that is), you will get better response, and therefore better engagement and in turn share it out to their friends. If you’re not engaging with your audience and getting the conversation going, you’re simply not going to have much to measure.