Thursday 10 March 2011

A practical approach to ROI for Social Media

Measurement and analysis are key to an online marketing strategy. The objective of the activities is to increase the number of contacts and expand the business. Therefore it is important to establish where new clients are coming from. It is likely that the website and social media will be used to confirm a client’s view of your company. Using LinkedIn or Facebook will mean that the potential customer already has a business relationship with you.

At this point, it is not really possible to attribute participation in social media to a direct financial return, unless perhaps you are retailing online.

What matters are new customers, new relationships and increased sales. At the same time, it is so important to measure your social media marketing efforts. Then you can tweak and improve your actions and eliminate the activities that waste time.

For a simple scheme, we would track:
• Google Analytics for web site performance, new and returning visitors
• Google Analytics will also show which referring sites are productive
• Google Adwords for referrals and keyword performance
• Google Maps for regional positioning
• Qype and other recommendation sites for reviews.
• Google Alerts, SocialMention and Twitter for mentions and references.
• Klout for Twitter performance.

Although there are more sophisticated tools freely available, this is a good way to get started with a social media campaign. For more about social media for business, check out PDC Internet Solutions at http://bit.ly/9jW6Gd on Facebook, http://linkd.in/gsmQlv on LInkedin, @pdcnet on Twitter. or http://www.pdcnet.org.uk/

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