Tuesday, February 2, 2010

How to track and measure Social Media

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Social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Stumbleupon, Digg, Diigo help you get the desired traffic. Social media is a new phenomenon and businesses need to use the right tools to get accurate results. The first step is to understand what you need to track and what is your goal. Some businesses may want to track only a particular campaign on a specific channel, or the number of people sharing the website, or the number of positive comments etc.

Google Analytics helps to track the website data, traffic, rankings, visitors, and traffic sources...Specific events and campaigns can be tracked for social media. Websites like Bit.ly help to track the number of clicks that the particular page has received. As a part of marketing activities, general engagement metrics should be made a part of the monitoring process. Gauging unique visitors, time spent on the site, frequency of visits, conversions etc help to measure the success of marketing efforts.

There is no single tool that helps to get the information you need. You need to gather the information and aggregate the results. Google page rank, Alexa rankings, Technorati, are some of the sites that help you track social media activities. It is an art to understand web analytics and requires the expertise of professionals to study it. Also one needs to analyze the data and use it to engage with the audience in a better way. To get the desired results, businesses need to revamp the way their social media process operates. A goal needs to be established with regard to connecting with customers online, and what needs to be communicated to the customers. One must assess if people are listening and if they are,what is it that gets them hooked. Let customers participate and engage with them on a personal level. See what gets traffic and use it to your advantage. Not all these measurements are appropriate...Getting the revenue or profit data from the client before and after the marketing campaign is an easy way to analyze what needs to be done next and the areas of improvement.

Source: Mashable

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