Measuring Your Social Media Efforts

So the experimentation with social media has begun; well it’s begun for us and more broadly a lot of businesses are beginning to test the waters, that is, if they are not already fully submerged!

Social Media Marketing is a key strategy to employ when trying to enhance the your websites landing page SEO. At Intelligent Information Systems the experimentation has begun in correspondence with the overall of our website in an effort to improve our overall web presence and to conjointly improve the SEO of our site.

Social Media is a way to get high quality back links to your website.

The key tools for measurement which shouldn’t be overlooked are:

Google Analytics

Google analytics will not help you understand the viral nature of various social media completely. But when using the combination of Google analytics and conversion tracker, you can learn an awful lot about where traffic is coming from and map it to your social media campaign to see what is working; at least directionally.
You should look at sources of traffic and see if it is broadening to include the elements of your social media campaign. You can also look at key variables like:

•Time spent
•Bounce rate
•Page views

Looking at and considering these variables will all help you make inference-based decisions on the quality of the traffic you are driving to your website.

Emerging Social Media Measurement Tools

Many new tools are emerging for measuring social media effectiveness. Most are limited in scope to one channel or type of social media experience.
One promising new tool, that will measure the viral effects of social media, is the popular ShareThis platform. ShareThis reaches over 400 million people a month though the social media share buttons you can add to your content that they provide as part of their service. This service is simple to implement on your site. If you don’t already have sharing functionality, you should consider implementing ShareThis or something like it.

ShareThis is about to add the ability to analyse social media by business category, which will be very useful for niche businesses. The company recently shared some interesting stats regarding social media with TechCrunch. According to the company, Facebook accounts for 45 percent of all shared content across its network. E-mail followed with 34 percent and Twitter with 12 percent.

The key here is thinking about social media as a coordinated piece of your overall marketing mix and measuring it as such. While measurement tools are not perfect, you can get enough data today to make solid decisions to help you optimise your social media campaigns.

Original Article: All Business.com