Archive for the ‘Social Bookmarking’ Category

Social Media Metrics

How do you measure the success of your social media campaigns?

Social media marketing actually encompasses a broad range of tactics, goals and strategies. Let’s look at the metrics as a function of what social media can do for you…

1) Establish a Presence

Do you have a presence everywhere your customers hang out on the web? How do you measure this quantitatively? Make a list and check it off.

2) Build Awareness and Drive Traffic.

This is directly measurable through your website analytics. Look at the source of the new traffic.

3) Capture Names and Build Lists

Well it just so happens that you can measure this directly from social media. Your basic metric is the quantity of new connections, followers, fans & subscribers (email and RSS).

4) Build Relationships and Trust

Ok, this is where social media can really shine. And, it is the most difficult to measure. Some suggestions for metrics are the number of interactions with your customers. How active are they in communicating with you? How many comments on your blog post? How many referrals to your site? How many retweets? Are you adding value? The number of inbound links to your site and any improvement in your search engine rankings (as compared to your competition) will also show the quality of the relationships you are building.

5) Conversion to Sale

When you make a special sales offer, you can use your web analytics to track conversions. But often conversions come through time with the increased relationship. It is often not one outlet that led to the sale but a series of exposures over time. Still, you can use web site analytics to trace the source of the sale. You can use surveys (how did you hear about us?). The metric is the increase in sales and revenues. Look at the dollar value of the new customers and its source (from analytics).

6) Upsell or Re-sell

How well are you getting additional sales from your existing clients? Measure this based on where the existing customer came from when they clicked through to make a purchase.

To get to ROI, you’ll need to know your sales income (by referring source) and your expenses (time/money spent on social media, opportunity loss, outsourcing costs, etc.). Again, social media is about building relationships, so the ROI should be increasing over time as you build those relationships. That’s another metric to look at. Look at results as a function of time, not just individual campaign. You should see an improvement over time of the cost of sale.

Social Bookmarking:

Social bookmarking allows you to store, organize, search, and manage links to web pages on the Internet. Social Bookmarking sites use metadata “tags” to organize links which lends to search engine optimization of the content. The social bookmarking sites offer web feeds of the bookmarked links which enables users to find new bookmarks that are shared by others.

Tips:

• Bookmark articles relevant to your customers or business using one or more of these sites.
• When you see relevant articles to your business, write a comment and link back to your site.

Resource List:

• Digg – Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users..
• AddThis – AddThis is the #1 bookmarking and sharing button on the Internet. We help website publishers and bloggers spread their content across the web by making it easy for visitors to bookmark and share content to their favorite social destinations.
• Delicious – Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.
• StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon uses ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages that friends and like-minded stumblers have recommended..
• Facebook – Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Millions of people use Facebook everyday to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet..
• reddit – reddit is a source for what’s new and popular online. vote on links that you like or dislike and help decide what’s popular, or submit your own!
• Mixx.com – Use YourMixx to tailor the content categories, tags, specific users and groups, and we’ll deliver the top-rated content as chosen by you and people who share your passions. Lists user-recommendations for stories, photos and videos. Customize the start page, join private groups, and rate content.