Whilst nobody can deny how popular social media marketing has become to a vast number of businesses, there is some debate about measuring how effective the marketing actually is. Many analytical tools used in traditional marketing campaigns and indeed many web based marketing tools, don?t necessarily work in finding out the effectiveness of marketing on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Some crude measures like counting the number of followers, friends or ?likes? will give an overview of the effectiveness, but won?t necessarily paint a full picture.</p> <p>Rating Engagement </p> <p>According to Gadi Ben-Yehuda who is an expert in social media marketing trends, there is more that businesses should do to rate the effectiveness of a social media campaign: ?The good thing about followers and friends is they are easy to count,? he suggested. ?What it does not tell you about is the actual engagement.? A massive amount of followers who ignore your posts are not a valuable as a smaller hard core of users, who regularly respond, comment and debate the issues raised on your social media platform.</p> <p>Analytical Tools</p> <p>A number of free services exist, such as Tweepskey, which analyses your Twitter followers, giving you information about their influence and level of engagement. Other services chart the geographical locations of your followers, and score your followers according to how they use their social media sites. Rather than using the blunt instruments of counting followers, a range of more intricate measures will help you truly assess the success of your social media campaigns.<br />