Category — Social Media

One question I hear a lot is, “how will I know if our social media efforts are successful?”  This is a very valid question, but one that doesn’t have a straight forward answer.  The answer really depends on what your goals are for social media.

The following are some items that I would consider indicators of success with your Social Media efforts:

• Number of Visitors to your web site or blog
• Number of visitors that sign up for your mailing list or special offer
• Number of Sales Made
• You are an influencer and your tweets, posts and blog postings are shared by many others
• Engagement of your following – look at the activity on your Facebook pages and Twitter streams and other networks are you communicating with your target market

If you are a job seeker or self employed you may measure your success by one of these items:

• Getting hired by a company as a result of your Social Media efforts and connections
• An invitation to speak at an event through your Social Network
• Landing a Business deal through Social Networking
• Establishing Relationships with influential people
• Finding a Business Partner

As you can see there are many ways to measure if you are achieving Social Media Success.  I measure my success in Social Media in a variety of different ways.  The following are some of the top indicators I look at:

• Traffic to my blog
• Connections with Influencers
• How often my information is shared and or commented on
• Landing Business Deals

Social Media usage is still pretty new and as it evolves the ways that success is measured will change, right now the biggest focus should be on what are your goals and are you hitting them – if not what do you need to do different?

I have heard many businesses ask, “What is the best way to get my team members or employees to embrace Social Media and use it effectively and not waste time?”  This is a very valid question and one that can be addressed in a few different ways.

Once it is decided that you will begin using Social Media in your business it is important to outline the goals you hope to achieve by using Social Media and a policy around the usage.  Establishing your goals and a policy will help you when you start getting your team engaged in using Social Media.

Once you have your goals and policy it is time to share this with your team and begin to get them on board.

The first piece of getting your team on board is to explain why Social Media is important and the goals that your company hopes to achieve with it.  The team needs to understand why they are doing this and what the goals are.  Understanding the goals will help direct the Social Media activities your team engages in.

The next step after ensuring everyone understands the goals and why Social Media is important is to make sure your team is properly trained.  This training should include an over view of the Social Media tools that the company is using, how to use them and examples of both proper and improper usage.  A key element that should be included in this is also how to effectively use them without wasting time.  Often it is very helpful to have a schedule and a plan that is followed.

Ensuring that your team understands the Social Media policy is also a crucial part of your success.  The team must understand the direction the company wants to go in and the guidelines around what information can be posted and shared and where.

The last component I would suggest to help your team jump on board and use Social Media effectively is to measure the activity and results on a regular basis and share this.  Review the number of Facebook Page likes and interactions, the number of Twitter followers and interactions and also try to map this over to company growth.  If your team sees the results of their efforts they will be encouraged to keep up the work.

The way that we search for information and do business has drastically changed over the last few years.  It is not enough for a business to run a television, radio commercial or a print ad and expect to get the results that they used to get.  It now takes the integration of several marketing channels and many of them are Social Media channels.

Most businesses now have a presence on Facebook and Twitter and many also have a presence on YouTube as well and for those that work in the B2B arena they also typically have a presence on LinkedIn.

One thing that you must keep in mind however is that you need to integrate your Social Media Marketing with your traditional Marketing.  What does this look like?

Social Media and Marketing Integration can take on several different formats.  The key items that I would like to stress however are the following:

• Use your Social Media profiles to direct connections back to your website and/or bog

You want to have a home base which is your website or blog and you want to entice prospects to find out more about you and visit your home base.

• Integrate Social Media into your blog or website

There are many ways to integrate Social Media into your home base.  This can be done with using Facebook Connect and tools like Twitter Tools.  This will allow you to share your Facebook and Twitter streams on your home base as well as share information from your home base on Social networks.

• Publish your Social Networking connection information on your print and television marketing

When you do use print and television marketing always include information on how your target market can follow you on Facebook and Twitter (at minim).

Your goal is to be sure that you are making it easy for customers and prospects to find you via Social Media as well as find your Home base through Social Media.

You will also want to embrace Social Media and utilize it to build an active following and supports for your business or product.

Here are other posts I came across this morning that talks about integration:

Top 10 reasons to integrate in 2011

The power of converging social media with display advertising

photo credit: Marc_Smith

Here is a quick follow-up post to the post from last week on What is your definition of Social Media .

This question is one that is being asked and answered in a variety of places lately.  Over the week-end Mashable collected the top 20 responses to the question “What is Social Media” What is interesting about how they collected the answers is they were via Twitter so the answerss were all 140 characters or less.

Here are some of the top buzz words that came from the answers:

• Collaboration
• Network
• Conversation
• Sharing
• Relationships
• Multi-dimensional
• Inclusive
• Information
• Community
• Personalization
• Empowering
• Real Time
• People
• Content
• Dynamic
• Power of the Crowd

The full post can be read here: What is Social Media