From setting up a business page on Facebook, to engaging people through Twitter or LinkedIn, the internet is awash with opportunities for brands to connect and engage directly with online communities – every marketer’s dream!

Despite the drive towards social, many marketers are tearing out their hair trying to answer the million dollar question on every CFO and CEO’s lips: “What’s the business impact?” It’s all very well saying your brand has 500 Facebook likes, but this means zilch in the business world if you can’t harness the data effectively and understand how it drives or correlates with improved business performance.

Until now tools have failed to answer the ROI question in full – that’s why we’ve introduced Adobe SocialAnalytics, to the Digital Marketing Suite – it removes the guesswork associated with social media engagement and helps Marketers to manage their strategy and investments based on measurable outcomes in the context of broader multichannel marketing efforts.

This year we’ve witnessed Facebook drive forward a large element of social commerce and this trend is set to continue. We’ve been working with them to develop a best practice guide on how businesses can measure and optimise the business impact of the Like button. When used properly it pinpoints how conversations and social media engagement such as ‘likes’, comments and page visits, drive important actions such as orders and revenue. It’s also able to drill down into the actual conversation in terms of tweets, comments and blogs so marketers are able to see the type of people driving discussion and influencing others.

Atlantic Records is a great example of how this can work. Having signed some the world’s biggest artists, social media is a vital form of promotion for them but they were previously unable to link its impact to record sales. Using SocialAnalytics, they were able to see how a tribute to Amy Winehouse, at MTV’s 2011 VMA awards, drove 170,000 social media mentions and how that social media spike was followed up with 159% increase in visit to the artist’s website and a 302% increase in sales of the record. Likewise, during the promotion of Bruno Mars’ new single they were able to see when a particular Tweet from his phone drove spikes in traffic to his website and who downloaded his tracks.

Fans and followers are the web hits of our generation – real success needs to be measured beyond this and link back to how it is affecting the bottom line. By doing this marketers can finally show accurate ROI and most importantly, impress those holding the purse strings.

To find out more, check out our SocialAnalytics website or follow us @AdobeUK, @smorris75.