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

Monday, February 1, 2010

Social Media trends for 2010

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In 2010, Social Media will become more popular, more mobile and more exclusive. Niche networking sites will be a trend leading to exclusive users following you or being on your friend list. Connecting with people who share common interests, hobbies, and having professional associations will give people a purpose to have you on their friend list. Sites that focus on particular interests such as photography, writing, music, or based on demographics that is, age, gender, occupation etc. will gain popularity. This will help to lessen the clutter and will bring in more value. It will also make it easier for marketers and advertisers to target their messages and audience.

In countries like India, going mobile will be the greatest advantage for social media enthusiasts. Picture this - There are more than 65 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices and that number grows daily. MySpace estimates that 50% of its Website traffic will be mobile within 24 months. All the major social media sites have mobile versions of their Websites. Another reason for organizations to go mobile is the ban on social media sites by organizations. This will see a rise in the percentage of smartphones that will get people to use social media and its advantages will only increase.

The convergence of social media and ecommerce will reach greater heights with companies like Zappos receiving more accolades. Zappos is a classic example of a company using social media to showcase its culture to the outside world. Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, tweets more about his philosophies of life rather than business. Dell is another successful brand that has optimized social media for business. There are several interesting aspects of how Dell uses social media to leverage its business. They have an active presence in every social media channel and have used this as an opportunity to connect with millions of customers.

Online reputation management is another aspect that will see growth. ORM deals with monitoring the reputation of a brand online, dealing with negative comments and protecting your brand via social media channels. Monitoring, repairing and managing are the three steps that companies need to work on for online reputation management.

Google Friend Connect lets users to connect with friends on different websites. Google reports over 5 million sites using friend connect while Facebook Connect has around 15,000. Google SearchWiki is nothing but social media search. SearchWiki allows anyone with a Google account to change the order of search results and make notes about each result in Google. This will help to improve core search results. And will help to rank websites in the future.

The channels that will be widely used across businesses are microblogging sites such as Twitter. The biggest advantage of Twitter is that it lets you network with people in your industry, there is a lot of freedom and space for carrying on conversations. Helps you get the desired traffic and views to your blog. Twitter is in fact a central point for social media activities.

Source: Businessweek
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