Most companies now have a Social Media strategy in place, whether it be in use for PR purposes (as a lot of big companies are doing with Twitter) or for Lead generation (this is the side that most marketing companies are talking about). Regardless of your approach, it's going to be important to understand how things are working for you.

There are some important statistics that you're going to have to monitor, like audience size and interactions, but if you're active across multiple platforms this can get a bit confusing. The fact that there are hundreds of different terms being thrown around, all of which basically mean the same thing, doesn't exactly help. On top of this, there's some more important and all together more interesting things you're going to want to monitor, and they may not be the first thing that gets drawn to your attention.

What I'm going to do is break down for you all the different things that might get mentioned in a report to help you get a clear picture of how your campaign is going.

Audience

Twitter moves closer to PPC as it launches self-service advertising

With the rise of social media and it's use in business, different platforms have been quick to bring advertising services to the table. And why not? Google PPC and Facebook PPC are valuable weapons in any company's digital marketing arsenal. However, Twitter have been somewhat slower on the uptake. Whilst its true that there millions of punters on Twitter, all conversing on topics potentially relevant to your business, most people seem to agree that introducing an advertising platform that doesn't compromise the service will prove difficult.