More and more small businesses are turning to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to increase their customer base and improve profits. Consider that Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004 and in seven short years, it has over 750 million active users. In addition, Facebook is an aggressive advertising medium that targets visitors very effectively.
Another popular social networking website, Twitter, conducts over 1.6 billion searches every day. This site, which allows its users to send short,140-character messages known as “tweets,” generates 200 million of them per day.
If you are business savvy, you invest your time in these two mediums to start. How do you measure your return on investment in social networking? You might have a huge number of followers on Twitter but does that equal profit? First, start with a clear profit objective in mind.
Social media marketing is a completely new venture. You do not want all the intricacies to sidetrack you. It’s easy to get caught up in the social aspect of these sites as many people talk about personal issues and not business.
You want to secure the tools that measure how you are doing on these sites. This includes organizing your URLs so that you can track information such as where the customer is accessing your business, coupon codes, and other promotions. Analytic add-ons and unique URLs accomplish this. Google Analytics and HootSuite are tools that provide both of these characteristics.
With Google Analytics, you can track where your customers are coming from, how often they stay, and where they go. You want this kind of analysis because social media is a fast-moving media. Understanding this aspect, is the first step to calculating your social medial ROI.
HootSuite, offers management tools to keep track of activities on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. It has an advanced feature that allows you to preset posts and track the activity of each link you send.
A more advanced product is, Vitrue SRM. It allows you to track all your social media. It has a neat feature that will compare performance information from posts, designs, and video.
Social media is a growing phenomenon, and is definitely applicable to business today. In order to be effective, you must be able to figure ROI. Fortunately, you have some very effective tools to accomplish this. You want to make sure you have a clear goal in mind. Then you want to take advantage of these tools to insure you have a very good ROI.
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