You’re online social marketing campaign is, in it’s best form, a PR campaign. The highest value of success to your campaign may be added dollars to your income or you may have other goals. Whatever ambitions you strive for, tracking the larger success of your campaign is important.
It may seem simplistic, but the first step in your social marketing campaign will be to outline your specific goals. “My goal is to make more money.” Yes, but this is a social marketing campaign; how do you want customers to see you, what is your company personality? Playful, intellectual, serious, an everyman, liberal, conservative? You may want to avoid politically polarizing personalities, but this is an issue in how you are perceived and what people say about you. Whether or not you think of your business as having a personality, one will be assigned to you by the mouths of the media. This would be an appropriate time to focus on your mission statement. Other than making money, why are you in business and what is it you’d like to accomplish. A personal mission statement is an advantage in staging related conversations as well, spreading your “brand” through online social networks in a greater variety of ways. Social networks are a little like being in the school lunchroom again and trying to decide if you’re better off with the jocks and cheer-leaders, the nerds, or the outcasts. Deciding who you are will help you find your market foundation.
There are a number of web analytics companies available to crunch numbers for you and make pretty graphs, but if you don’t know what you’re looking for and what the benefit of those numbers is, they won’t help you. At Biznetix, we are prepared to help your business interpret these statistics and make the best use of them. Things to remember and take note of:
Visitors, Unique Visitors, Visitor Frequency- I recently had a friend telling me how certain of his blog posts were way more popular than others and he thought that meant they were the posts people liked. The number of visitors to your site or blog is comparative to how many people looked in your shop window. A lot of these might mean you’ve found a popular key-word, but it won’t tell you how effective the key-word is for you or if you’re achieving the popularity you want. And a Visitor may come to your site more than once. For a clearer understanding of your actual audience size analytics track Unique Visitors. Individuals are identified by a login or by a cookie ID downloaded to their database. Visitor counts divided by Unique Visitor counts produces Visitor Frequency. This is a better sign that you are achieving the results you set for yourself. If you’re looking for audience growth, watch to see if your Unique Visitor count is growing. For a check on the loyalty of your constituency, check your Visitor Frequency.
The Buzz, Citations, the Scoop, the Ripples- Social popularity isn’t just about who comes directly to your site or blog. It’s also about how many times and in what light you are mentioned and referred to by others. Technorati has a ranking system tracking links and citations, Facebook Lexicon tracks the frequency of any keyword you choose (this does not necessarily correlate to positive commentary). Different analytics will track different aspects and it’s important to note just exactly what they are basing their figures on.
Names to know in Analytics: Web Trends is the raw data source Biznetix works with. They are one of the original sources and offer a large quantity of data. Technorati, Google Analytics, and Google Alerts are also big names to know, ClickTracks and Feedburner are the last I’ll list but far from the last of the names in Web Analysis.
Analysis and number crunchers are important to keep you from getting shortsighted, caught in the opinions of the most recent posters. However, don’t be afraid to scan a little yourself to see what the buzz is, read the comments people leave, and participate in the conversation, after-all that’s what social media is all about, two way open communication. In that same spirit, Biznetix is available to answer your questions. It's part of our mission that our customers shouldn't just accept what we tell them; We want you to understand and be truly informed about your choices.
