If you’ve integrated social media into your business plan, you need to track your progress – you track your sales and your customer base, why not track your social ROI? As with all business ideas, to be the most effective, you need to measure your progress (the good and the bad) so you can adapt the best plan that works for you.

Start by understanding the basics:

• What is your goal?
• Do you want to track how people are sharing your website?
• Do you want to track a specific social media campaign?
• Do you want to track trends related to a specific topic?

When you’ve figured out the answers to these questions, you can choose the right tools for the job. Below are our top picks for social analytical tools.

Socialmention.

Social Mention is a real-time social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user-generated content from across the web into a single stream of information. With this tool, you can easily track and measure what people are saying about you or your company on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Google and many others.

Bit.ly.

This tiny URL shortener helps you share, track and analyze your links. It’s simple: just shorten a link, share it and see how far it goes. It will tell you where users clicks are coming from and how many times they visit.

TweetStats.

Transform your Twitter use into easy-to-understand graphs that break down your tweets by hour or by month, giving you a tweet timeline and tracking your followers’ interactions.

SocialToo.

SocialToo can help you keep your follower lists coordinated and organized across multiple networks so you can learn more about the relationships you have online. Create surveys, track statistics, auto filter and file and much more. You can also get a daily email sent to you that tells you about new followers or un-follows.

BlogPulse.

A great tool for tracking blog buzz. Conduct Trend Searches that allow you to create graphs that visually track buzz over time for specific keywords, phrases or links. Compare search locations, and compare search trends back to back.

Try one or try them all. See which one fits your style and your company’s needs. Staying on track with analytics makes the difference between a campaign that succeeds or one that flops.

Here is a quick video to remind you of the 3 maps all businesses should be on today!

Whether you have a website or not your business needs to be on these maps. And if you have a website this is going to help you with your local marketing efforts. There are other local directories that you should look into adding your business listing to. Some of these directories will be free other will require a fee but it may be worth it.

Get started by taking 15 minutes out your day and put your business on these maps.

Google – Create a places account & you can even provide special offers! (places.google.com/business)

Yahoo Local (listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php)

Bing Local (https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx) – and here’s a tip if you use Chrome or safari like me, you need to switch to Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox to proceed.

And did you know Bing Maps are now on Facebook? When you search businesses on Facebook if they don’t have a business page but do have a local listing on Bing they will now appear on Facebook.

And if you already have a Facebook business page you can merge these listing to ensure your customers are finding you.

That’s this week’s Monday Minute pass it on, tell me what you learned or even ask a question.

Here is a basic outline of Meta Tags you can incorporate into each page of your website through your content management system.

Titles – Give your page a name
Every html document must have a title tag in the header section. The title is the blue underlined link that shows up on Google. For example, “About Us.” It is also important to incorporate keywords into this title if possible, as title tags are given the most weight by search engines. If you are a bakery in Boston, for example, “Our Menu – Betty’s Bakery Boston” is a good title.

Meta Description Tag
This is a description of what the page is all about. This is what comes up on a search engine under the blue linked title – a brief sentence that sums up the page and is shorter than 155 characters.

Our Meta description is: “The Technology Therapy Group is the singular solution for all your web communication needs. Look to us to help you develop, design, and market your website.”

Meta Keywords
Your keywords are the words or phrases that you or your customers use to find your website. To choose the right words for your site and understand how to properly and effectively incorporate them into your content, see our SEO Keyword Guide here. Depending on the content management system your website is based in, it will vary where you actually put these words in the back end. Though this tag is not acknowledged by search engines anymore, it is still a great way to help you stay organized and focused on 2-3 complimentary phrases on each page of your website.

Meta data can be a helpful tool in helping you stay organized and focused on the overall goal of each page.