One of the things that I love about marketing via social media is how easy it is to see results.

And I always advise that my clients monitor their social media marketing campaigns, so they can tweak and adjust as necessary. Testing and tracking, baby. It’s all about the testing and tracking.

Here are some of the ways that I do it:

I use Tweetbeep and Google Alerts, to see when my name is mentioned. Among other things, when I tweet a link to a new blog post on my other website, www.thepressreleasesite.com, Tweetbeep lets me know every time someone retweets (as long as they give me credit.) This tells me how effective I am in spreading my message, and which types of posts are best-received.

I also have Google analytics installed on my blog so I know where all of my traffic is coming from. This tells me which social media platforms work best for me, and which ones are a waste of time. At this point, I get most of my traffic from Twitter, then I also get a lot from the Warrior Forum - www.warriorforum.com, and I get some from Facebook and Linked in, and the rest from organic search.

I often use bit.ly or http://cli.gs/ as a link shrinking tool. These tools allow me to see how many people clicked on a link that I post in my tweet.

I also search for my name on www.addictomatic.com, technorati.com, socialmention.com, and other tools - and I search for competitors names as well.

These are just a few of the many - free - ways that I keep track of how well I’m doing with my marketing efforts. What are your favorites - free or paid? What am I missing?

I gave a webinar for PRWeb today - THANKS, Jiyan Wei, Nida, Kate, and all you awesome people, for inviting me!

Things I learned from giving my first webinar:

1.) I got Keynotes, a slideshow program for Mac, I learned how to do fancy builds and all kinds of dazzling special effects…I needn’t have bothered. When I started checking around before doing this webinar, all the experts told me that special effects on slideshows are generally distracting and they slow down the slideshows for a lot of people.

2.) Always do a dry run several days before your webinar so if there are glitches you have plenty of time to fix them.

3.) Plan for every possible emergency. I took my dogs to the vet for the day so they wouldn’t bark in the background - yes I work from home! - and I had my charged up cell phone standing by in case my home phone battery died and I printed out my presentation in case my computer crashed.

4.) Use pictures from istockphoto to illustrate your slides. $1 each. Can’t beat that. Also Fotolia, Getty Images, Corbis, etc. - stock photos give a very professional touch.

5.) There’s free pie chart software on the web - pie charts are the awesomeness. http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createAgraph/default.aspx - That’s a good one.

6.) For branding purposes get someone to make a colored bar with your business name to go across the top of your webinar slides, and your website’s URL.

7.) Lists of bullet points are your friend, but break it up with some some slides with color.