I’ve been dabbling, well ‘doing’, social media as part of my charity’s comms since mid-2008 – not an excessively long time, but adequate to have gained enough ground to start measuring its impact.

I hear mixed opinion about this in the sector; from ardent anti-strategists (incidentally, Labour MPs seem to favour this tweet-and-go option) to hardened PRs who argue that it's not worth doing anything unless we measure its effect on audiences and brand.

I believe that social media (tweets, Facebook updates, etc) must be authentic, non-corporate and conversational.

So it's hard to a) ‘plan’ a strategy on how to talk to people (‘dear diary, today I endeavour to speak to seven people, and laugh at four jokes’) and b) measure the emotional impact of people you engage with.

But lo! Tools such as Twitalyzer and Facebook analytics – two free tools in the legion of DIY metrics out there – now tell me that I have 5.1 per cent velocity (ooh) and 3.2 per cent clout (ahh) on Twitter, and 9.4 Facebook post quality.

These somewhat abstract stats may allow me to record fluctuations and improvements, but I'm now capturing the more useful numbers (eg number of people who comment on our Facebook page, and people that @reply or retweet our messages on Twitter) in a weekly spreadsheet.

Two free tools I recommend are Twitter Analyzer and Samepoint. The former shows growth of your followers over time, and – really usefully – the numbers of users that read your tweets on given days (so you can work out which were your more popular conversation-starters).

Samepoint.com has become a standard in my toolkit. Enter the name of your charity and see who is blogging and micro-blogging about you in real-time.

This has allowed me to pick up on tweets from people who didn't know we had a presence on Twitter, start to follow them and say hello.

While I like the ease of plugging my @moniker into a self-generating page of ‘facts’, stats and figures; I think – if you have the time – at present it's helpful just to aggregate (eg though Samepoint) a list of who’s talking about you; keeping a note of how many there are and whether it’s broadly positive or negative chatter.

Stay simple; it’s a fluid media so it’s probably best to sanity-check yourself based on your conversations. It’s not exact science, but neither are any social skills.

Just don’t start making notes when talking to people face-to-face. That might look weird.