Facebook-for-business Guru Lara Solomon from Australia, otherwise known as the Social Rabbit, has asked me to be a guest blogger today while she’s on vacation and she asked me to write about a topic relevant to social media and business. Since measuring results is made so easy and instantaneous on social media, it’s worth a few hundred words today.

There are a variety of tools to measure your impact on social networks and with so many freebies available, I recommend trying them first. This way, you’ll get an idea of what you need and whether they do the trick.

To help you find the best, I refer to a discussion a few weeks ago at the Crain’s Chicago Business Social Media Breakfast downtown. My colleague Matt Batt was one of the panelists, along with fellow social media gurus Diane Rayfield and Gini Dietrich. I picked up a lot of great information, which I tried to condense here.

See my list of the best freebies at http://www.socialrabbit.net/2010/10/michelles-post/, and let me know what you think. What are your favorite tools (free, for a fee, or subscription based) for measuring and analyzing your results? I’m eager to hear what’s working for you.