Social Media Wrap UpJanuary 2012

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Social Media Wrap Up: January 2012Table of Contents

Questions to help you decide: should you use social media

4 Fresh Reasons Why Social Media is the New Farmer’s Market

Why Your Company Might Want to Consider a Social Media Agency

Social media experts can’t do it all for you. It’s yours

Social Media as a Brand or Person?

12 things I thought I knew About Social Media in 2011 15 Things I’ve Learned from 138 Social Media Tweetchats Stagger Social Posts for Maximum Exposure Page

48 Ways to Measure Social Media Success

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Questions to help you decide: should you use social media

…is social media right for your business?

There are a lot of social media “experts” out there who will tell you that every single orga-nization on the globe should be participating

in social media. They will point to the cool Facebook fan pages they’ve made or the funny videos their clients have on YouTube and say “see, you can do this too.” And they’re right. You can.

The question is: Should you?

The real answer to that question is “it depends.” It depends on whether or not it can do one of two things.

1. Save you money2. Make you money

If it isn’t going to accomplish one of those two goals, then you have no business engaging in it. Why?

Participating in social media is expensive. I know everyone talks about how cheap it is…but that’s because they are not thinking like a business owner. They’re thinking like someone who knows how to

open a YouTube channel account or sign you up on Twitter. It’s true, creating an account on many of the tools and networks is free. But that’s where free ends.

To integrate social media into the rest of your mar-keting, which is an absolute if you want to consider it a business tool, you are going to have to expend some resources. Social media requires care and feeding. It requires brand integration. And it re-quires a well-conceived strategy. All of those are going to cost time and money.

Don’t misunderstand. I believe in the power and reach of social media and most of our agency’s clients are using social media tools as part of their overall marketing strategy, but I am not bullish on the belief du jour that everyone must do it and it’s free. Neither is true.

Here are twenty questions to ask yourself as you consider melding social media into your existing marketing strategy.

How will it save us money?

1. Will it allow us to stop doing something we’re currently doing?

2. Will it allow us to extend/expand something we are currently doing?

3. Will it lower our customer acquisition costs?4. Will it connect us to existing customers in

an efficient way?5. Will we be able to use social media to create

a community specifically for our customers?6. Will it be easier for our customers to rave

about us/create positive word of mouth?7. Do we look behind the times to our custo-

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Questions to help you decide: should you use social media

mers if we aren’t there?8. Will it introduce us to new potential custo-

mers at a low lead generation cost?9. Will it make us more findable (either within

the social network or on search engines)?10. Will it impact our search engine results?

(so we don’t have to buy results)

How will it make us money?

11. Will it shorten our sales cycle?12. Will it create credibility/trust faster

among prospects?13. Can we establish ourselves as the expert?14. Will it shorten customer service response

time?15. Will it create a sense of accessibility for

our customers?16. Will it increase trial of our product/ser-

vice?17. Will it allow us to connect with more

prospects at once?18. Will it increase repeat buying?19. Will it increase up sells?20. Can we collect/use testimonials?

If the answers to those questions indicates that so-cial media would be a smart investment for your company to make, then you should be there. But now you will enter into it knowing that there’s a return for that investment.

Now we’re talking smart marketing, not marketing hype.

You might also like

1. You can’t sleep through your own social media efforts

2. What should you buy from a social media savvy agency?

3. Do you have confidence in your social media strategy?

4. What social media tools are a must for business?

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4 Fresh Reasons Why Social Media is the New Farmer’s Market

I had the chance this sum-mer to speak in rural Ja-pan (Kumamoto, Kyushu for those of you who might have been there to see Mount Aso) at a workshop on social me-dia for the agricultural industry. Whenever I speak, I always mention how social media truly transcends industry (as well as discipline) and always ask someone to challenge me in finding an industry that can’t find a use for social media.

The agricultural industry is ripe (pun intended) for using social media because it really does represent what the farmer’s market used to be. Farmer’s mar-kets don’t just sell agricultural products, either, so listen up all you small businesses!

It’s often where your customer is at

If you wanted to sell your produce in the past, you had to go to where your audience was. With 65% of Americans using social media, there is no doubt that your audience is spending more and more time on social media. Obviously you need to figure out which platform is appropriate for you, but there is a social networking site out there where your tar-get customer lurks. Chances are that platform will be Facebook, but depending on your product you might have better luck concentrating on LinkedIn.

It’s often where everyone is being social

Everybody congregated at the farmer’s market. It was a huge social event. So is social media. The key to being successful, therefore, is that we have to be social. We can’t just set up a Page and expect things to happen just like you can’t just set up a stand and expect to sell. You shouldn’t be over-pushing your product like some vendors do, but those that tend to sell a lot of produce at my local farmer’s market are those that have free fruit samples. Not only do my kids love them, it gives us a chance to try out their products and establish a relationship with the vendors. What is the free “fruit” that you are giving away to those who engage with your business in social media?

It gives you a chance to go direct to your customer

The advantage of social media as a marketing tool is that it allows you to go direct to your customer. Similar to how vendors need to build trust at the farmer’s market by providing quality produce week in and week out, you too need to do the same with the amount of online conversation and recommen-dation apps that exist. That’s why you should be taking advantage of what social media provides you to get to know your customer a little better. Don’t be shy: engage.

It gives you the ability to easily establish a new brand

I actually spoke at a workshop that was co-sponsored by Tomamo-chan. Tomamo-chan is the result of a major seed distributor realizing that Kumamoto is the leading producer of tomatoes in terms of volume

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4 Fresh Reasons Why Social Media is the New Farmer’s Market

in Japan, but very few consumers knew this nor were buying tomatoes specifically because they were from Kumamoto. The seed distributor got several of the leading tomato producers to join forces and create a new brand to co-brand their products going forward. Such is how “Tomamo-chan” was born – “Toma” coming from tomato and “mo” coming from Kumamoto. A cutesy character was created (displayed above), and through the help of my friend Katsuyo Nakao, they were able to easily establish this brand by tweeting and launching a Facebook Page where fans could actually see, and help “Toma-mo-chan” grow up. I always say that social media provides a land of opportunity for unknown brands to make a mark in whatever marketplace they are trying to establish a presence. By showing up in social media with a unique brand in a consistent and engaging manner, it is as easy to establish a new brand entity through social media just like it is by consistently showing up at the farmer’s market.

Case in point to drive all of this home: At the end of the presentation, a gentleman in the back of the room raised his hand to share his experience with us. He was a watermelon farmer from the rural prefecture of Oita. He started a Facebook Page and was sharing how watermelons were harvested by using both photos and videos. There was nothing high-tech about what he did. In fact, he didn’t even have any apps installed or a Facebook Ads budget. He had some of his friends “Like” the page and it grew from there. One day someone simply posted on the wall that they wanted to buy a watermelon, and he took the order via email. Since then he confided he’s sold quite a few watermelons.

A tea farmer also stood up and reminded us of how much content farmers had to share – and how good it felt to share it. The farmer reminded us of how labor-intensive and tedious a job traditional agri-culture is in Japan, but that when “fans” started to “Like” his photos, it made him proud.

Yes, social media can make your company and your employees feel good too!

Sometimes we overcomplicate social media with the technology and tools that we can leverage. If you remember that social media is the new farmer’s market and think how you would represent your company at the biggest farmer’s market in the world, hopefully you’ll see how common sense should be the cornerstone of your social media marketing strategy.

Have you ever sold a product through a Facebook Page comment? How do you feel when someone Likes your content? Let’s chat!

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Why Your Company Might Want to Consider a Social Media Agency

As someone who has traditionally worked with compa-nies consulting with them on their social strategy, I realize that for many of them they are interested in creating a strategy as part of a social media audit to see what they can do to better maximize social media or what is possible. The problem, however, is best indicated by the question I always get: “Do I have to hire someone to do this?”

Social media requires an investment in time, re-sources, and education among over things. I re-cently wrote about why this can be counter-intuitive to small businesses who want immediate ROI from social media marketing. Larger companies and big brands have the resources to invest and are willing to take a long-term view of social, but the problem now becomes a new one as indicated by the ques-tions companies should be asking themselves below:

Do we have the people in place to invest in so-cial? You need potentially create an entirely new department which must include an experienced community manager, a content czar, and a social media strategist. Do you have people to spare in place to handle the job? The right social agency will. With limited personnel budgets, bringing on

a social media agency is a logical move to help you immediately ramp up within your potential budget constraints for employees.

Do we have internal expertise in social? It’s not about hiring an intern or learning on the job. You wouldn’t hire a sales executive if they didn’t have sales experience. Why would social media be any different? Your brand is at risk if you can’t engage with those that are both saying negative things about you and are missing out on huge opportunities by not developing brand ambassadors with those saying positive things about you in social media. It requires a different mindset and set of core compe-tencies to succeed, and social media agencies that have worked with a multitude of companies on their social implementation have acquired expertise that is hard for a solo practitioner to emulate.

We use an agency for ads, but what do we do with social ads? Social Ads on sites like Facebook, Twitter and even LinkedIn are already accounting for more than 10% of online ad spend in 2011. Has your company began to invest in social ads or are satisfied with what your traditional ad agency has done for you? Social media agencies who offer ma-naged social ad services can help your company effectively microtarget communities where your target audience is because they deeply understand who uses and how they use these social destinations.

We use an agency for creative help and expertise – but why would we need them for social? Social media is ripe for experimentation and creativity in order to better leverage the functionality that they offer as well as figure out how to better engage with your targeted community. Social media marketing needs to be creative because it is not digital mar-

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Why Your Company Might Want to Consider a Social Media Agency

keting; it is not about pushing your message out but in communicating with and listening to your audience. A good social media agency can provide you with advice here because they understand the social website platform functionality as well as have probably had creative experience in the creation and management of social media campaigns that were socially interactive.

Not every social media agency is alike nor offer all of the above services, and companies are best to do due diligence by selecting an agency carefully and making sure they make sense in their offering and are truly hand-holding you through the process rather than creating a black box and asking you to pay dearly for it. But if you think your company can go it alone without an agency, you might want to make sure you are confident that you have all of the above pieces in place at your company. If not, why not contact a social media agency and find out what you might be missing?

What’s your take on the potential role of a social media agency?

And if you want to see me speak on the issue, see my Social 5150 video below. Thanks!

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Social media experts can’t do it all for you. It’s yours

…no effort, no real gain

I will admit right off the bat, this is a bit of a rant, which you know I don’t do very often.

I was on the phone with a prospect (an organization who is just contemplating how/if they should begin to participate in social media) and I was talking about the process we’ve developed to help clients create a social media strategy that actually defines why they’d invest resources into the effort and then measures against those goals.

Just like any marketing strategy — we identify au-diences, key messages, the right channels etc.

We end up creating a very robust strategy with our clients and then we teach them how to implement it. For the next several months, we walk along side them as they get their sea legs. We help them test drive different tools and schedules until they really feel confident that they can generate, conduct, find and participate in the kinds of conversations where they can add value and get value in return.

After that, we help them tweak the strategy and we might help with some content editing or repurposing some existing content for a blog or e-newsletter — but for the most part, they’re doing it on their own. Because it is their conversation to have.

At this point in the phone call the prospect stopped the conversation and said “wait a second, are you saying that you don’t believe you should do it all for us?  I’ve talked to four other firms/consultants and no one’s ever suggested that we would do some of it ourselves.  They said it would be much easier on us if we just paid them a monthly fee and they took care of it all.”

What??? Are you freaking kidding me?

I’m not going to get into the “social media expert” discussion because it’s been done to death. But, it infuriates me when people hold themselves out as any sort of expert and then purposefully give their clients bad advice because it puts more money into their own pocket. It’s not only a crappy way to do business and dishonest — but it has the potential to do some serious damage to the client’s business.

Of course hiring someone else to do it all for you would be easier. But that doesn’t make it better or even right. It would be easier if you sat on the couch rather than going to the gym — but you don’t actually build any muscles that way.

Now don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with hiring someone to help you. People hire MMG all the time for that very purpose.

But you have to do some of the driving yourself. Think about it.

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Social media experts can’t do it all for you. It’s yours

Can a paid consultant respond to a customer com-plaint on a Facebook page wall or add to a conver-sation about your area of expertise in your blog’s comment section? They can probably fake it. But it certainly is a lost opportunity if you let them “handle” it rather than you digging in and really either starting or enhancing a relationship — all in front of hundreds (or thousands) of potential buyers.

Don’t let any social media agency, company or consultant own your social media activity any more than you’d let a stranger answer your customer service line.

If you do, it may be the most expensive buying de-cision you ever make.

You might also like

1. Social media cheat sheet 2011

2. Social Media Cheat Sheet

3. Do you have confidence in your social media strategy?4. Social me-dia isn’t for eve- ryone

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Social Media as a Brand or Person?

Writing by Brick Marketing in Social Media

Every business should have a social media presence. It’s an important way to share and connect with target audience members, build a

brand, and improve your SEO efforts. Sometimes the hardest part about using social media for business is getting started. You need to decide which social networks to be active on and develop a strategy for each one. As part of that strategy you need to decide how your business will be represented and who will be the “face” of the strategy. Are you going to only set up accounts in the business name, or will an individual represent the business in social media? Will your primary Twitter handle be “Company X” or “Jane Smith” (SVP of Marketing for Company X)? How about both? There really is no right or wrong answer, just a few things to consider.

There is no confusion when using social media as a Brand. People know who they are connected to and more or less know what kind of information they will be receiving. However, the major drawback is that by hiding behind a company logo the strategy lacks that personal element that is so important in social media. People want to communicate with people, and it’s hard to feel any sort of true connec-tion when your followers don’t know who is talking to them. It could be the CEO, a VP, a marketing ma-nager, or maybe even an intern.

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Social Media as a Brand or Person?

Using social media as a human representative of a particular company eliminates that problem. There is no doubt about who it is sending you a message. You know that it is “Jane Smith”. There is more ac-countability on an individual which can result in more trust. While this strategy can work very well, it’s important to be aware of the problem that arises if that individual decides to leave the company. They will take all of those valuable followers along with them.

Because each strategy has pros and cons, many busi-nesses will utilize both. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as each account is treated differently. Don’t post the same exact content at the same exact time on both. Switch up the message on each and use a combination of informational, educational, or even humorous posts if appropriate. Remember, any account that represents a business needs to remain active and engage with followers regularly. Don’t think that you can let one slack because you have the other to rely on. Not every target audience member will follow both.

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12 things I thought I knew About Social Media in 2011 « Direct Marketing Observations

As 2011 winds down, it’s time for me to reflect on the state of my social media world in 2011.

Things that I thought I knew about social media in 2011:

1) That I knew what I was talking about

Just because I might know more about social media than the average person, it didn’t preclude most corporate heads to assume that they knew just as much about social, if not more, than I did. Can you say bite your tongue?

2) That the whole ROI thing would have sorted itself out by now

We’re getting closer, more and more corporations seem to now understand that you need to associate some type of KPI to a social initiative, which is a start in the direction of measurement; but you still had the camps of “you can’t make money from social media” to “let’s just grow our audiences across all social platforms and call it a win”. Ugh!

3) People would trust what I know and do as I advise

I found out in 2011 that although people would nod their heads in agreement when we’re in the conference room, once I was gone- the silos ree-merged, the battle lines were redrawn, the skeptics reappeared and the notion that a consultant was not necessary reared its ugly head-and thus the follow up discussions were slow to evolve. Can you say self doubt?

4) We had gotten over being enamored with the quantity of friends, followers, fans and likes

Some have and some have not and we’ll leave it at that. It’s a blog post in and of itself.

5) Corporations were ready to be transparent in 2011

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12 things I thought I knew About Social Media in 2011 « Direct Marketing

Observations

They’re ready as long as they have their social media policies in place. Even then, after the policies are in place, there’s transparency and then there’s “their” definition of being transparent-on their terms, and not the terms of the masses. It’s actually a start.

6) That the “new guard” would be saying so-mething different

New social media faces and new social media names talking and preaching about things we talked about 4 years ago. Where is the disconnect? Is the customer not getting it? Or is the consultant not listening? Or are we still not there yet? Do we want them to repeat what we have been preaching? Maybe so.

7) That the “old guard” would have evolved

Old faces and familiar names talking about the same things we talked about 4 years ago. Is nothing new? Or do people just not get it? Or is it uncorrelated wis-dom? Do we need to start teaching SM 201 and 301?

8) That FB would get to 1billion users in 2011

This is going to happen but I am starting to see little tiny micro-cracks in the Facebook brand. Can you say Facebook Burnout, Blowback or Billion?

9) That Twitter would be making money by now

Well they sorta are making money and they are rol-ling out custom pages for brands. Does that count as truly making money? No. The problem? Would you pay 5 bucks a month to use Twitter? No. Would you pay to advertise on Twitter? No. That’s my point. I think I might have predicted in 2009 that Twitter would be making money by now as well…Le Sigh

10) That 2011 would be the year that corpora-tions would be ready to adopt social media both internally and externally

Ha! Just because I got in to the boardroom and we were talking about it, didn’t mean it was going to be happening anytime soon. Of course I thought 2010 was going to be the year as well. Can you say mad silos?

11) Brands knew what they were doing on Twit-ter.

Last time I checked, brands are still using Twitter as a push style vehicle for marketing and selling product. Some have gotten creative, but most are of the Tweet with a link with no conversation camp….Does it work? Let’s ask them? Oh wait we can’t be-cause all they do is tweet links and sales. Is there an alternative? Sure there is, don’t do it in 2012.

12) Google Buzz would be around.

Silly me to think that Google Buzz was viable. Ac-tually it wasn’t. Neither was Sidewiki or Wave either. What’s the over/under on Google Plus survival? 2 years?

How do my “things I thought I knew compare with yours? Let’s share.

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15 Things I’ve Learned from 138 Social Media Tweetchats « Direct Marketing Observations

More than 2 years ago Jason Breed and I de-cided to create a Tweetchat. The format was pretty simple, we would find a killer,

compelling host in the social space, like a Beth Harte who was our very first host, and we’d pick a killer, topical, compelling, subject. After we settled on the topic, we would collaborate on 3 questions and off we would go to promote it for the following Tuesday. We also decided to create a killer, award winning, website thanks to developer Terry Mckyton that would captures all of the conversations in real time and even allows you to tweet from the site, but other than that, we were ready to go have Tweetchats. Boom.

When Jason first called me, he was looking for ways to brand his previous company. At the time, the Tweetchat, “Journchat“, was on fire and that was our inspiration. In the course of about a 1 minute conversation, Hashtagsocialmedia was born. We had no idea that 2 years and 138 tweetchats later, “Hashtag” as we call it would still be chugging along.

So what have I learned?

1) Tweetchat’s don’t work w/o participation. From having great hosts to having great participants, you need both to succeed.

2) The content comes from the crowd. The gold is in the conversations.

3) Trolls can easily be exposed and don’t last long, but contrarians can bring balance and perspective.

4) There is always a retweetable soundbite that can sum up the discussion. Always.

5) There is never a shortage of topics though some seem to be more popular than others.

6) Passion is never on short supply.

7) Smart people are everywhere.

8. The generosity of the hosts has always surprised me and yet doesn’t.

9) The value of the conversations lasts longer than the Tweetchat

10) We can always learn and takeaway something even from sub-par Tweetchats

11) Every Tweetchat will be different. No two are the same.

12) There is a ton of room for growth for all Tweet-chats.

13) There needs to be a next gen level of Tweetchats

14) Businesses, brands and companies should in-corporate tweetchats into their marketing mix

15) People actually learn from tweetchats.

I could easily come up with 123 more “things” I have learned, because I have learned something from each and every one of them, but the point is, there is always a takeaway. In fact, not only have I grown from these Tweetchats, but also from the half dozen others that I pop in to from time to time. The bottom line is that Tweetchats are a tremendous opportunity to network, grow and expand your user, knowledge and friend base to the nth degree.

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15 Things I’ve Learned from 138 Social Media Tweetchats « Direct Marketing

Observations

I’m better because of our Tweetchat, I’m better be-cause of the people I’ve met from them, and I know it brings value to others and that makes me feel pretty damn good. Tweetchats work. So tell me, have you participated in our or any Tweetchat? What has been your experience?

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Stagger Social Posts for Maximum Exposure

Writing by Brick Marketing in Social Media

There is a right way and a wrong way to use social media for business. Unfortunately too many companies think that “doing social me-

dia” means creating profiles on the big networks, and posting a few links whenever they feel like it. That is the wrong way. If you want to use social media correctly to build a brand, communicate with target audience members, and improve SEO efforts, it’s necessary to have a strategy and goals in place. One important goal should be to get your social content Liked, Shared, +1’d, and Re-Tweeted by others. This will improve brand visibility, ex-pand your reach in social media, build your own followers, and improve your social signals which have an impact on search engine ranking.

Of course, in order to get your social content shared by your followers, it first has to be seen by them. One of the biggest frustrations about using social media as a marketing tool is that there is a lot of noise. You are competing with other brands and friends, family, co-workers, and other acquaintances of your followers for their attention. Even those that use social media the most frequently only have so much time and don’t pay attention to every post that crosses their path. For this reason it’s important to consider timing when posting social media content and stagger social media posts.

The best time to post social media content really depends on your target audience so it’s important to understand their usage behavior. While it makes sense to hit a 9-5er with your marketing message right when they boot up their computer or while they are browsing their social pages on their lunch break, these times don’t make sense if you are tar-geting a college crowd or people that work nights because it’s likely that they are still fast asleep. You also need to consider the location of your target au-dience members. If you target a national audience or an international audience obviously the best time in one area isn’t the best in another.

Therefore, it’s important to post content more than once a day in order to ensure that it is viewed by a larger amount of people. If you only post first thing in the morning, that post will never be seen by someone that only checks their account at lunchtime because their feed has filled up with other posts. Many people follow hundreds, if not thousands of accounts. When posting more than once, it’s impor-tant to switch it up. Don’t post the same link over and over again, that will only be annoying to those that do see all of your posts! It’s all about finding the right balance that will be most effective.

03/01/2012 17:50

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48 Ways to Measure Social Media Success | Webbiquity

Ultimately, as Olivier Blanchard has pointed out repeatedly, social media marketing has to demonstrate an ROI (though he acknowle-

dges the questions have to be made more specific). In the b2b world, the “R” is generally leads (website call-to-action conversions) with some monetary va-lue applied to them.

But it’s crucial to the social media ROI debate to recognize that “R” is an end-of-the-process mea-sure. There are numerous in-process measures that may be impossible to tie directly to ROI, but are no-netheless critical in producing that final “R” value.

Consider automobile manufacturing as an analogy. There are an abundance of measures, from ma-chining tolerances on shafts to the temperature in the paint room, which are vital to track during the manufacturing process. The C-level folks may not know or particularly care what these numbers are, but if those values are off, they will affect quality, which impacts rework and warranty claims, which impact manufacturing and repair costs, which im-pact the ROI of each vehicle.

Similarly, in social media marketing, there are nu-merous intermediate “process” measures that don’t fit into an ROI equation, but which are vital in opti-mizing social media efforts in order to minimize “I” and maximize “R.” These metrics don’t represent the goals of social media marketing in and of them-selves, but are critical measures to help optimize processes to achieve the ultimate objectives.

Here are 46 intermediate metrics (and two final measures) to help marketers evaluate the success of their social media programs and optimize their associated processes. Most of these are easy and free to track.

Nine Blog Metrics

• • Overall traffic• • Traffic quality (e.g. bounce rate, average

time spent per visit)• • Most popular posts (indicates topics with

highest interest)• • Search traffic• • Social media/network-referred traffic• • Other key sources of traffic (e.g., company

website, newsletters, syndication sites)• • Number of RSS subscribers (regular rea-

ders)• • Number of email subscribers• • Top visiting organizations (measure of

targeting effectiveness)

Six Twitter Metrics

• • Total number of relevant followers (ex-clude the inevitable spammers and oddballs who seem to be attracted to any active Twit-ter account)

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48 Ways to Measure Social Media Success | Webbiquity

• • Interaction (@ mentions)• • Retweets (reflects both level of engage-

ment and quality of shared content)• • Most tweeted links (i.e., which content is

most popular with followers)• • Influence (e.g., Klout and Kred scores)• • Brand and mention tracking (e.g., from

HootSuite or other social media monitoring tool)

Six LinkedIn Metrics

• • Number of company followers• • Recommendations on products or services• • Page views (of LinkedIn company over-

view)• • Unique visitors• • Click-throughs (on product links)• • Followers by industry, function and com-

pany

Five Facebook Metrics

• • Number of Facebook page “Likes”• • Friends of fans (indicates an organization’s

total potential reach on Facebook)• • Number of people talking about you (the

number of unique people who have created content about the company page on Face-book in the past week)

• • Weekly total reach (the number of people who have seen one of the firm’s messages on Facebook in past week)

• • Most popular posts

Ten YouTube Metrics

• • Number of subscribers to the company channel

• • Total number of video views• • Change in views and subscribers over last

30 days• • Engagement measures:

• » Likes / dislikes• » Comments• » Shares• » Favorites added or removed• • Top videos, last 30 days• • Playback locations (e.g., regular YouTube

page, company channel, mobile device, etc.)• • Top traffic sources

Two Google+ Metrics

• • Number of people / organizations in com-pany circles

• • Number of people / organizations that have company in their circles

• • Note: Google has indicated that it plans to introduce more advanced analytics for Google+ soon

Ten Company Website and Cross-Social-Network Metrics

• • Total social media-generated visits to the company website

• • Lift in direct visits (an imprecise but corre-lated measure)

• • Lift in branded search visits (another im-precise but correlated measure)

• • Major social network visits by source• • Traffic quality by source• • Most-viewed pages by social media visitors• • Top visiting organizations (all social media

sources)• • Top visiting organizations (by major social

network)• • Lead conversions (all social media sources)• • Lead conversions (by major social

network)

If you’ve utilized the first 46 metrics to continually monitor and adjust your social media activities, the final two—the real return on investment for b2b

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48 Ways to Measure Social Media Success | Webbiquity

marketers—should validate and quantify the value of all your hard work.

Tags: Facebook metrics, Google, Hootsuite, how to measure social media success, Klout, Kred, Olivier Blanchard, social media measurement, social media metrics, social media ROI, Twitter metrics

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2011 at 7:27 am and is filed under Social Media Mar-keting, Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Social Media Wrap Up: January 2012Bios

Tom Pick is a digital marketing & PR executive with KC Associates, a marketing and PR fi rm in Minneapolis, Minnesota, focused on B2B technology clients. He’s also the award-winning writer of the Webbiquity blog, which focuses on B2B lead generation and Web presence optimization -- the fusion of SEO, search mar-keting, social media, content marketing and interactive PR. You can fi nd Tom here: http://www.twitter.com/TomPick

Nick Stamoulis is the President and Founder of Brick Marketing. With over 12 years of experience Nick Stamoulis has worked with hundreds of companies small, large and every size in between. Through his vast and diverse SEO, search engine marketing and internet marketing experience Nick Stamoulis has suc-cessfully increased the online visibility and sales of clients in all industries. You can fi nd Nick here: http://twitter.com/NickStamoulis

Drew McLellan’s a 25+ year marketing agency veteran who lives for creating “a ha” moments for his clients, clients’ customers, peers and audiences across the land. Sadly, for his daughter, he attempts to do the same thing at home. Over the years, Drew has lent his expertise to clients like Nabisco, IAMS pet foods, Kraft Foods, Meredith Publishing, John Deere, Iowa Health System, Make-A-Wish, and a wide array of others. You can fi nd Drew here http://twitter.com/drewmclellan

Marc Meyer is a digital and social media strategist at DRMG a marketing, management and analytics fi rm. His blog is in the AdAge Power 150 which ranks the top marketing blogs worldwide. He is a frequent contributor to Customer-Think, Social Media Today, Communications World and The Customer Collective. He is the co-founder of Hashtag Social Media which is one of the oldest and lon-gest running Tweetchats on the subject of business and social media and he has a book soon to be released on the best takeaways of those 135 tweetchats. You can fi nd Marc here http://twitter.com/marc_meyer

Neal Schaffer is a recognized leader in helping businesses to strategically lever-age and maximize ROI from social business. Currently SVP of Social Strategies at Social 5150 as well as Green Dream Social, Neal is the author of two social media books and frequent social media speaker. Neal’s social media strategy consulting accomplishments include working for a Fortune 500 company and a celebrity with nearly 1,000,000 social media fans. How can Neal help you? You can fi nd Neal here http://twitter.com/NealSchaffer/