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Social media marketing can bring traffic and links to any website. What's missing — and essential — is proper measurement of these new techniques. Often times, social media marketing is dismissed before its true effectiveness is realized.

Using Web metrics is nothing new and analyzing data for clients is routine for any Internet marketer. However, the tools we use and the stats we focus on need to change when applying social media marketing to your or your clients' strategic marketing plans. Today, standard Web analytics applications track bits of information we are all accustomed with, such as page views, referring URLs, traffic geo-segmentations and numbers of visitors.

For social media marketing, what we really need to be concerned with is buzz and viral marketing. For example, if you've managed to leverage some content on a site like Digg, how do you measure its reach and effectiveness once that content starts to go viral? Using standard Web metric applications gives us a good idea of the initial push on Digg, or any other site, but the full extent of the campaign is lost. Similarly, you can benchmark your current inbound links before a social media campaign and then carry out another benchmark several weeks later. But when it comes to social media metrics, this is primitive analytical reporting. You're not seeing the entire picture and the potential of a successful social media marketing campaign.

Lets take a look at the core differences between standard Web analytics and social marketing metrics.