Step One: Know Your Goals

Any good marketing plan starts with established goals. You need to know what your goals are before you can measure how successful your efforts have been to achieve them.

What do you want to accomplish through your social media efforts:

• Sell more products?
• Get more reviews?
• Establish yourself as a thought leader?
• Drive more traffic to your Website?
• Generate leads?
• Increase your fan base?
• Reach a specific demographic?

Outline very specific goals so you can measure the results of your efforts.

Step Two: Establish Your Baselines

Based on your goals from step one, establish measurable baselines you can use for comparison later.

Create a spreadsheet that includes:

• Current sales numbers
• Review counts
• Number of hits in Google
• Website stats
• Other baselines specific to your goals

Clearly, some things are easier to measure than others. Quantitative elements like sales, website stats, and Google hits can be tracked easily; however, more qualitative elements such as thought leadership, influence, or customer satisfaction can be trickier to measure.

You may be surprised at just how many things are measurable in social media. Check out this post entitled “100 Ways to Measure Social Media” posted by Marketers Studio in 2009. This lists demonstrates that there are many things that can be measured. Your job is to establish which items are true indicators of your efforts based on your established goals.

Step Three: Track Your Efforts

There are plenty of tools you can use to help measure your social media efforts. Internal features of social media tools like Facebook and WordPress, free external tools, and paid services can all give you insight into how well certain strategies are paying off.

It is important during this step to use more than one tool to track your efforts. Each individual tool can give you specific insight into one or more aspects of your social media presence. Together, a carefully selected host of tools can give you a complete picture of how your efforts are paying off.

It is also important to focus only on the data that is relevant to your goals. It is easy to get lost in the “numbers” and lose track of your goals. Some of the data may not be relevant to your goals – focus on the data that is.

Internal Tools

Start your tracking and analysis from within many of the tools you already have in place – here are a few to get you started.

Facebook Insights

Facebook’s statistics tool, Insights, can help you track and analyze demographics, engagement, referrals, click-throughs, and more for your Facebook pages. Access this tool from the main menu when you edit any Facebook page.

Facebook Insights breaks down the demographics and activities of a page’s fans. This feature also allows you to gain insight into how users engage with specific content, where your referrals are coming from, how well individual posts are doing, and more.

The latest version of Facebook Insights includes demographics and metrics for overall Facebook page activity, the reach of your Facebook content, the people who “like” your content, and insights on how your content is shared.

When viewing these metrics, keep your goals and baselines in mind.

WordPress Stats

If your website or blog is powered by WordPress, there are a number of good plugins that can help you analyze your site. I recommend WordPress.com Stats, mainly because it is developed by the WordPress.com team.

Using this plugin, you can get a very good picture of how visitors are interacting with your site: which of your posts are the most popular, where your incoming referrals are coming from, which key terms visitors are using to find your site, which outgoing links are clicked, and more. You can drill down to get more details on many of the stats, but keep in mind that only you are going to know which results are relevant to your specific goals.

FeedBurner

Burning your RSS feed or blog to FeedBurner means that your blog subscriptions (either via feed reader or email) can be managed, optimized, and analyzed using the FeedBurner service. You can see which of your posts are the most popular, drill down on your subscriber demographics, and more.

HootSuite

HootSuite is a platform to help you manage one or more Twitter accounts as well as integrate your other social media tools and blogs with Twitter.

In addition, HootSuite has some nice analysis tools you can use to analyze your Twitter accounts. Their pro version also allows you to integrate Facebook Insights and Google Analytics so you have a one stop place to get insight on your Social Web presence.

This tool can help you get a feel for which of your tweets are getting the most engagement, and even attempts to calculate the “sentiment” of your Twitter followers toward your tweets.

Free External Tools

There may still be questions you need answered that the tools above are not able to accommodate. Luckily, there are some free tools that can help even further. Here are a few to consider.

Klout

Klout uses an interesting set of criteria to determine what it refers to as a “Klout Score.” The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses variables on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus to measure what they call “True Reach,” “Amplification Probability,” and “Network Influence.”

True Reach is the size of your engaged audience and is based on those of your followers and friends who actively listen and react to your messages. Amplification Probability is the likelihood that your messages will generate actions (retweets, @messages, likes, and comments). Network Influence indicates how influential your engaged audience is. An overall score over 30 is considered good.

This scoring method can help you pinpoint specific areas where you may need improvement. For instance, the results depicted below demonstrate to me that I should take a close look at why my posts do not get as many “actions” as they should, especially since one of my goals is to increase virality.

There is a fair amount of controversy as to how accurate Klout scores are at measuring influence. But this controversy simply reinforces why the best approach to a successful measuring framework is to use a variety of tools, avoiding the temptation to rely on one “magic” number to measure social media success.

Google

Google still has about the best host of analytics tools at your disposal. Google Analytics can help you track and analyze website and social media visitors. Google Webmaster Tools can help you gain insight into how Google indexes your site, which search terms are used to find your site, errors on your site that may be keeping it from placing properly, and more. You can get advanced metrics on specific search terms with Google Trends, and Google Alerts can keep you informed when certain terms (like your name, your business name, your website name, or your book title) land high in search results.

socialmention

Real time search engines and analytics tools like socialmention can give you good insight into the kind of attention your posts and updates are getting. In addition, socialmention shows the reach, sentiment, and passion followers have for your name or brand. These search engines can also give you insight into the key terms that are typically associated with your brand.

PostRank

PostRank is one of the few paid services that still has a free option. Using PostRank, you can track not only your social media efforts, but engagement on specific pages of your website. It also allows you to track documents like PDFs, videos, or presentations. You can even use the service to analyze your RSS feeds.

You can get a lot of information on individuals updates or blog posts as shown below. Scrolling down this page reveals individual engagement activity, like tweets mentioning the post and more.

Paid Services

There are a lot of social media metrics services popping up now-a-days, but with all of the free tools at your disposal, you won’t likely need them. Large companies, major brands, and PR firms running regular campaigns are typically the target market for such services.

If you do find yourself in need of a paid service, though, here are a few that have earned good reputations in PR and marketing circles:

• PostRank
• Radian 6
• JittterJam

When choosing a paid service, here are some questions to ask:

• Does it integrate your social accounts like Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter?
• Does it measure all of your social accounts?
• Does it measure your RSS feeds, Website, and other documents?
• Does it measure interactions across other social sites?
• Does it show specific interactions?
• Does it measure engagement within your social accounts and on your website?
• Does it show “tags” or key terms used to find your content?
• Does it interface with Google analytics or other analytics tools like Facebook Insights?

Step Four: Stay Informed, but Trust Your Instincts

Don’t get overwhelmed by all the “advice” out there. You know your business better than anyone, so don’t fall into the trap of following advice that does not apply to your goals. I am not suggesting you ignore what others are saying, but I do suggest choosing only a few good sources that can help you stay informed on the latest trends in social media.

Here are some resources to consider:

• Mashable
• ReadWriteWeb
• SocialMedia.biz
• SocialMediaToday

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

I also recommend a slow and methodical approach. If you are building a consistent and optimized online presence that you periodically analyze and adjust to meet your goals, then you are on the right track. Trust your instincts: keep doing the things that are working, and ditch the things that aren’t.

Deltina Hay is the author of The Social Media Survival Guide and The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web. She also teaches the online version of Drury University’s Social Media Certificate program. Learn more about Deltina and her availability for speaking engagements at Deltina.com. You may also enjoy listening to her video tutorial series on YouTube.

Subscribe to the Social Media Tip O’ the Day Feed

The latest entry in the WordPress segment of the  Internet Empowerment Series of video tutorials, this video walks you through how to configure and maintain the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKBqEU7aU60

The latest entry in our  Internet Empowerment Series of video tutorials, this video shows how to take advantage of Facebook’s new profile design by placing custom images along the top of your profile and page that align nicely with your profile image.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh0W3DAUxWY

Released by “new influencer” Paul Gillin’s publisher, Quill Driver Books, the previously named “A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization” is now in its second edition and renamed The Social Media Survival Guide.

The new edition of The Social Media Survival Guide has been thoroughly revised to document the latest versions of the most effective social media tools.

The second edition includes new information about creating social media marketing strategies; new social media technologies and capabilities; new analytic tools for measuring success; and new tactics for integrating social media sites.

Also included are completely updated how-to information, with supporting graphics and screenshots, on the new evolutions of WordPress, Facebook, microblogging, creating and customizing website widgets and badges, and more.

You can purchase the book directly from the publisher, or from Amazon.

Please let us know if you would like to review the book.

Thank you for your support!

When you create a presence in the Social Web, you are, in essence, branding yourself. Here are some tips that can help you do so consistently:

• Use similar bios in all your profiles: You may want to tweak them to fit specific sites, but they should still be consistent in tone and content.
• Use only a couple profile pictures throughout your entire presence: Part of good branding is consumer recognition.
• Keep your tone consistent: This comes with knowing your audience and writing consistently for them – everywhere.
• Maintain a consistent name across all platforms: This will also help with search optimization.

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About the Author:

Deltina Hay is the author of the critically acclaimed book, A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization. The second edition of her book, renamed The Social Media Survival Guide, will be released in spring 2011. Learn more about Deltina, her books, and her availability for speaking engagements at Deltina.com. You may also enjoy listening to Deltina’s video tutorial series on YouTube: The Internet Empowerment Series.

Subscribe to the Social Media Tip O’ the Day Feed

Here is a good small business social media strategy put together by Mashable.

For those who are just getting started, it is important to create a manageable plan out of the gate. Here is a plan that is manageable and has some good tactics as well. Don’t forget to optimize, though!

http://mashable.com/2009/10/28/small-business-marketing/

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Get the Social Media Tip O’ the Day iPhone App!

About the Author:

Deltina Hay is the author of the critically acclaimed book, A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization. The second edition of her book, renamed The Social Media Survival Guide, will be released in spring 2011. Learn more about Deltina, her books, and her availability for speaking engagements at Deltina.com. You may also enjoy listening to Deltina’s video tutorial series on YouTube: The Internet Empowerment Series.

Subscribe to the Social Media Tip O’ the Day Feed

If you are still in the planning stages of your social media strategy, or if you know someone else who is, here is a presentation that walks you through the process from strategy and planning to implementing and optimizing to integrating and creating policies.

Originally presented to the St. Louis Publishers Association, there are many tips in here for seasoned social media users – especially authors and publishers.

Building a Solid Social Media Foundation on SlideShare

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Get the Social Media Tip O’ the Day iPhone App!

About the Author:

Deltina Hay is the author of the critically acclaimed book, A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization. The second edition of her book, renamed The Social Media Survival Guide, will be released in spring 2011. Learn more about Deltina, her books, and her availability for speaking engagements at Deltina.com. You may also enjoy listening to Deltina’s video tutorial series on YouTube: The Internet Empowerment Series.

Subscribe to the Social Media Tip O’ the Day Feed

The latest entry in our  Internet Empowerment Series of video tutorials, this video shows how to create and place custom widgets on your WordPress blog or Website:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIRkYcTKlJE

The latest entry in our Internet Empowerment Series of video tutorials, this video shows you how to find LinkedIn badges and how to place them on your blog or Website.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekAubusdZjI

Most social sites make it easy for you to find your personal feed URL (also called a feed address), while others can be more challenging.

Your feed URL lists all your activity within a social site or service. These feeds consist of images, video, recent blog posts, presentations, tweets, whatever is relevant to a particular service.

This video shows you how to find your:

• WordPress feed URL or address
• Flickr feed URL or address
• YouTube feed URL or address
• Twitter feed URL or address
• Slideshare feed URL or address
• and more

The video tutorial from the Internet Empowerment Series on YouTube also demonstrates methods for finding feed URLs on any site by using your Web browser or searching the site’s page source.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw2ePwWW-fg