Before you can accurately and effectively track the success or failure of your social media efforts, you have to start by knowing your objectives. What is it you hope to achieve by putting your real estate brand on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, a blog, YouTube, and the like?

To measure success, you need a goal. Measuring the success of your social media efforts is crucial. After all, free isn't free if you're wasting your valuable time.

Are you looking to increase traffic or something more specific? It's a good idea to establish what a conversion is – is it a phone call, an email, a referral? Is it a new client? A home sale? Measuring your results takes understanding what it is you're trying to measure.

Quantifying online connections is the easy part, but it's only the first step. How that engagement affects your ability to generate leads is what ultimately matters. Internet driven marketing provides real opportunities for understanding, tweaking and perfecting your real estate brand marketing strategy. Social media provides the platform for marketing and advertising, as well as customer service and retention.

Two of Your Best Friends are Free

When it comes to tracking and measuring the impact social media has on your bottom line, two of the best tools in your belt are free – Google Analytics and Facebook Insights.

Google is constantly tweaking and perfecting its social tracking tools, and you will find increasingly great ways of measuring your social media KPIs through Google Analytics. The Social Traffic Report will expose how traffic coming in from different social media sites are converting along the lines of average time on site, page views, and goal or ecommerce conversions.

Google's URL Builder can help you identify which social media interactions generate the most traffic. You can also measure the impact of social media on your site's SEO by correlating social media referral traffic with changes in the volume and quality of organic search traffic. This valuable insight can help you make significant adjustments to you content and strategy.

The internal suite of analytics tools offered by Facebook will help you better understand who "Likes" your brand and how they engage with it. You can access a breakdown of user and geographic demographics to see, at a glance, if you're reaching your target market.

Returning to Google for a moment, setting up Google Alerts can be a great way to see if anyone else picked up your post or promotion. It can also introduce you to competition you weren't aware of, which is always useful.

To view the orginial article, visit the Properties Online blog.