How Do You Quantify Social Media Impact?

By Edward Nawotka, Editor-in-Chief

CoverCake, covered in today’s feature story, promises social media analytics customized for publishing. It’s undeniable that social media is having an enormous impact on book publicity and marketing, but analyzing its true impact is tricky, if not downright impossible. How do you really quantify the number of book sales that result from retweets or Facebook likes? So, we do our best: looking at Amazon sales rankings (which are accessible to all) or combing the Nielsen BookScan data for clues. Yes, sometimes it’s obvious, but more often than not it’s much more elusive.

So tell us, how do you quantify the impact of social media on your publicity and marketing campaigns? So you subscribe to any of the services mentioned in our feature article? If so, what has been you experience? Or do you manually track mentions and try to match them up with bumps (or dips) in sales?

Let us know what you think in the comments.