Do you know the impact of your blog content on social media sites like Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and so on? It is vital to find out the answer if you are not sure. Knowing how well you are doing on the social media front needs to be a major factor in any SEO strategy you develop.

Internet users are highly drawn towards using social media in their daily life today and new users are flocking to Facebook and Twitter by the droves each day.

The advent of the Internet has made it such that people can connect with people all over the world. Social media platforms provide an avenue for internet users to meet and engage each other. For SEO and internet marketers alike, this is an important factor to take into consideration.

Users today love to share things they find interesting. Social signals refer to the amount of times content is shared among the social networks. For search engines like Google, viral content give out strong signals that show the content has both value and relevance in the eyes of the users.

To make your content rank well in the SERPs, you need to ensure your posts are shared among users in social media sites. Aside from ranking well, this also means an increase in visitors coming from social networks as content is shared.

It is obvious that keeping track of social media is important. Important things that you need to know will be things like how many times has a post been Tweeted, how many people have given a Google +1 vote, how many people have liked the post on Facebook or shared it, etc. If you have a accurate measure of these things, then it is possible to create social media campaigns that have incredible reach. Otherwise, you might as well just leave money on the table.

Still, there is still the issue of how to obtain the data that you need. The long and pain way would involve going through all the major social networks to find mentions of your content. After that, you would need to order it in a way that made sense. Obviously you have better things to do with your time. The big challenge is to be able to gather, compile and format social media metrics data in a way that saves time, money and effort.

Social media monitoring and reporting can now be a piece of cake with some powerful tools made available on the market today. If you own one of these tools, then it would make planning an effective social media strategy much more practical. Now that social media is playing an increasingly vital role in the growth of the Internet, you cannot just rely on link building. To get past your competition in this race, you will need to start monitoring social media.