12 tools to measure social media marketing
Welcome back!
Businesses have been unsure of ways to measure social media campaigns, social media ROI and syncing the stats, if any, to sales data and vice versa. Here are 12 tools that I came across that can be used to track the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.
One important fact one needs to remember here is, Social media optimization is not a number race. Businesses need to focus on growing brand awareness, customer acquisition, engagement, interaction, conviction, retention, sales, profits, and customer satisfaction rates.
So without further delay, here is the list of tools I promised.
Google Analytics: Free tool to track and report on a company’s Web site usage and online marketing activities.
TwitterAnalyzer: Free online tool analyzes a company’s influence on Twitter, including number of daily Tweets, users who are re-Tweeting your messages and their unique reach.
HootSuite: Popular free service manages and analyzes multiple Twitter users and accounts. New iPhone app links HootSuite account to mobile phone.
Radian6: Sophisticated tool that tracks conversations about competitors and share of mentions, among other metrics. Pricing starts at $500 a month per profile and $100 a month per user.
ViralHeat: Delivers real-time data from video sites, microblogging platforms and Web sites. Prices range from $9.99 a month to $139.98 a month.
Bit.ly: Free URL shortener that tracks information such as number of clicks, traffic sources and what time clicks occur.
Scoopler: Free real-time search engine that organizes content being shared on the Internet as it happens through blogs and major social networks.
TweetMeme Analytics: Similar to Google Analytics, the app is useful if you use TweetMeme’s re-Tweet buttons on your site. Prices begin at $50 per domain per month.
PostRank Analytics: Suite of tools to measure social engagement on other platforms and services. Shows messages and comments from other sites that contribute to your statistics. Prices begin at $9 a month.
Twopular: Tracks the most popular trends on Twitter at no charge.
Xinureturns: Provides a free overview of your Web site presence on popular search engines and social networks.
Omniture: Captures, stores and analyzes digital transactions from Web sites and other online channels as well as offline channels such as point-of-sale promotions and call centers. Prices vary per user.
The 7 Step Twitter Strategy
Did you hear all the buzz about twitter?
Twitter is perhaps the most popular microblogging service. It allows you to post brief and frequent posts through web, IM, SMS from mobile or from an app. It is ultimate way to network with people around the world.
If you are a beginner or just starting out on twitter or want to change your twitter strategy, here is a reference guide which will walk your through each step and reveals a 7 step twitter strategy.
Grab it immediately and grow your business and network like never before.
Social Bookmarking Sites
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking defines Social bookmarking as a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the internet with the help of meta data.
For answers on what, how, why …, you can download this 2 page report from Educause.
Listed below are Top 45 bookmarking sites.
Read more
Ultimate Tips For Building Identity On Twitter
- Have a voluntary following.
- Demonstrate to your followers that you are the most informational person in your niche.
- Build credibility among followers that you can help them achieve their goals.
- Have the ability to motivate others.
- Continue learning and growing in your skills.
- Communicate often and encourage two way communication.
- Understand your strengths and weaknesses and work on the weaker corners.
- Hold a “Ask a question” day and inform your followers one day prior to the day you decide.
- Appreciate your followers when they share a tip.
- Know that each individual counts.
- Provide powerful & relevant bio.
- Give a link to your website where people can get more relevant information.
Effective use of twitter
(Warning: I was never on any social media before and an absolute bum to talk about it. This is just an opinion and not an expert advise).
I signed up for twitter to give it a try and found it very fascinating. I’m on twitter for valuable info which I get from 90% of the 46 people I follow. Well this number might increase or decrease with the time depending on the quanlity and quantity of info I receive.
If you are striving hard, just like me, to ramp up your new blog or website, you cannot afford to stay hooked on this eternal chat room all day. This will not only hamper your productivity but will have a bad influence on your identity.
I noticed few people using twitter strategically and effectively to achieve their objectives. I’m particularly fascinated by 3.
Building Identity
BarryBowman is strategically building his identity by posting valuable seo tips on twitter (most of the time). He follows 973 people and has a following of 880. His strategy (I believe): finds and follows people by keyword search and waits for a few days before removing them if they don’t follow him. Of course, he complains about finding it difficult to cope with so many people 
.
Sharing Info
Infosourcer is Manager, Internet Research at Deloitte. She shares interesting things relevant to net world (most of the time).
Keeping readers informed
Darren Rowse is a pro blogger with huge following. He posts about his latest posts with a little description about the post. This keeps me informed and gives me a choice if i’m interested in reading a particular post. He also tweets about interesting posts by other bloggers that he is reading.
It all depends on what you want to achieve with all the time you invest on social media. If you have specific objectives, chalk out a plan before you do anymore harm to yourself.
Try to answer (as candidly as possible) why, how, when, what, where, which …to use twitter or any other social media?
Why do you want to use twitter?
What are your prime objectives?
How are you going to achieve those objectives?
When or how often are you going to tweet?
What are you going to tweet about?
Which twitter tool would help stay connected without wasting your time?
Happy Tweeting 
Authenticating Mybloglog Community
I am experimenting with Mybloglog for the next one month. This will be a part of my social media networking experiments. I signed up for MyBlogLog. You can do this with your existing yahoo ID or create one.
MyBlogLog enables you to track that last little bit of information about your website. You probably already know where your users are coming from and you probably already know what pages they’re looking at while they’re there. However, if you have a blog or any other site where you frequently post new content on the main page, you don’t have a good way of tracking what people find interesting. One way is to track when people click on the links you provide. Up until now, outbound link tracking has been a pain in the butt, requiring CGIs and managed links. MyBlogLog makes this process easy.
But why do you need to know what people find interesting on your site? You can use it to tune your content to be even more compelling for your readers. You can use it to determine which stories you should follow up on. Hell, it’s just cool to *know* what people find interesting, even if you don’t do anything with it.
Once you have changed your profile, you got to authenticate your site by adding a little code in a post by adding a meta tag in the header. Add the widget to blog or site.
I’ll have to wait and see how this works for me and my blog.
How to tweet on twitter
SMM (social media marketing) is a way to build brand recognition for your business through social media like facebook, myspace, flickr, digg and the like. In short, the websites where news, photos, videos, and podcasts are hosted via websites through user submission.
Twitter is a lot easier and simpler social networking and micro-blogging service. All you will need to do is answer the question, ‘what are you doing?’ in less than 140 characters. These short messages are called as tweets.
Signup for a free twitter account. Consider using your real name rather than business name or some abstract alphanumeric combination. This will help build credibility. Change your profile, immediately. Include all keywords about your business, interests or whatever you want to use twitter for.
Click find and follow to follow people in already in your email contacts or type a keyword to find people with similar interests. Follow, if you find any interesting. My twitter name is ShriNagesh. You can choose to restrict
All set to to send your first tweet. Type a small message (max 140 characters including spaces) telling people what you are doing. You can send tweets through twitter website / sms from mobile / instant messenger. If you think it doesn’t make any sense and is sheer waste of time, then you are under estimating twitter potential.
Your tweets are immediately displayed on the your profile page and instantly delivered to other users who are following you. You can can restrict delivery to those in your circle of friends. Default setting is delivery to everyone.
You can also uploads images to twitpic.com, a site to share photos.
I downloaded twhirl, a 3rd party application for twitter. Twhirl stays on the desktop (logged in). I don’t need to visit twitter website during my hectic workday. It stays on the desktop. All I do is, click twhirl icon from the system tray and type a short “whatever i’m doing” tweet. Twhirl also notifies when I receive messages from my followeres or the ones i’m following. So I don’t miss a thing without wasting my time. This application is twitpic enabled.
There are many applications for twitter like twitterfeed (similar to twhirl), twittervision, which shows the geo position of the your twitter friends and so on.
You can market your site through twitter. Just add your site link in the message. Make sure its not long, as it would be shortened to tinyurl. This will ensure that your sitename is atleast read, if not clicked. Ex: one of my tweets today was “Adding new web templates to TemplateFair.com”.
Once you take a spin, you’ll find it real fun and you are still on business.
Donts: Dont sound like a marketing guy
Don’t send messages like “please visit my site. Here is the link”
Have fun tweeting.