Pareto Principal in Social Media Marketing !

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., "80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients”.

From my personal experience I can suggest that the 80-20 thumb rule applies for social media marketing as well.  We can certainly state that very small portion of effort is attributed to the leads .But irony is we don’t know which part of effort works ,hence we don’t have much choice left ,except keep trying to maximize the probability of the desired output to get realized.

Following are two thumb rules which are very useful in social media marketing:

1. 80% of the time, you should be sharing non-promotional content. The other 20% of time, promote your brand. 

2. 80 % of your Social Media Marketing time, should be spent in listening. The other 20% of time, open your mouth.  

Rising Significance of B2B portals in Downturns!

By Vinaytosh Mishra

B2B Marketing has always been about networking. In recent years means of networking has changed significantly. During slow downs firms must test new strategies and tactics to improve marketing effectiveness and reduce the cost. Businesses need to maintain agility and adapt to an evolving marketplace, but cannot sacrifice tried-and-true tactics that have driven their lead generation programs for years. 

Recent studies by firms like Marketing Sherpa indicate that marketers are investing in tried-and-true tactics such as trade shows, website marketing and email, and are allocating the greatest slices of their budgets to these tactics.

Trade shows have claimed the greatest percentage of marketing budget allocation in year 2011, with its greatest supporters being large organizations. On average, organizations of this size invest a third of the marketing budget to trade shows. 

As the use of tablets, e-readers and smart phones increase, and more print publications add online services to readership, organizations in the media or publishing sector are prioritizing websites with the greatest average budget allocation of 22%. The B2B Portals like Alibaba.com, NetworkToday.com, and IndiaMART etc are increasingly becoming the starting point of information search in case of B2B marketers. There are many other B2B Communities portals which are operated by community as non profit organization but they most lack the cohesiveness provided by B2B portals operated by companies.  

Image: portalpattern.org

Prioritizing tasks is an absolute must for SEO!

By Vinaytosh Mishra

Some people prefer working early in morning while some like burning mid night oil. When are you the most productive during the day? Instead of trying to swim against tide try to flow freely with time .Getting into a verbal argument with clock is certainly not a good idea.

I personally hate driving and consider myself more than a driver (no offense to auto geeks).And spend time during travel in thinking about the posts and planning other things. I note down the points on gazettes or simply on a piece of paper. This exercise saves a lot of time of mine.  

I make it a priority to get the articles completed before going to bed. Prioritizing tasks is an absolute must. 

Prioritizing SEO Tasks:

 

Now that we have identified our most productive time during the day the next step is to prioritize our tasks. First create a list of everything that needs to be completed; you can do this on a daily basis or on a weekly basis. What tasks need to be completed and what amount of time and effort will be needed in order to satisfy the requirements? After prioritizing each task you need to fit it into your schedule. 

This post was written by Vinaytosh Mishra for Web Bazaar. To view similar post log on to http://www.webbazaar.com/blog.

The Best Way To Use Wikipedia To Promote Your Small Business:Tips by Linchpin SEO

Wikipedia articles rank high in search results for keywords,yet this medium is only partially utilized.The main reason for this strange phenomena is prevalence of unskilled copy writers.The SEO operations of most of the companies is outsourced and vendors(in pursuit of profit maximization)  rely on low skilled data entry operators for content creation and online PR Management.Wikipedia requires high quality articles with reliable references.I came across a nicely written blog post on blog of a digital agency Linchpin SEO.I would like to share some of their tips on use of Wikipedia for Small and Medium Businesses.

Wikipedia, the popular community-edited website, is not considered a reliable source of information when writing papers or fact-checking information. Most believe that because anyone can create and edit the information on the site, the information can easily be biased and/or inaccurate. But that doesn’t mean that Wikipedia doesn’t provide value, especially when it comes to promoting your business.

Every article, or “page,” on Wikipedia is required to have a list of cited sources at the end of the page. These sources are cited in-text, allowing the reader to see the source of the information provided. And this is precisely how small businesses can spread their content they have written and marketing their small business. While the links are “no follow,” meaning that they don’t really count toward link-building in the eyes of the search engines, having your research article listed as a cite, with a link to the content is valuable.

While Wikipedia is community-edited, the community can be fickle about what is and is not acceptable for citing. As such, a business owner cannot simply write a research article, find a corresponding Wikipedia page, and post a link to their content. The following guidelines will help you use Wikipedia to promote your content and establish your credibility online:

Become A Contributor:

Wikipedia is more time consuming than other means of article promotion. This is because the community has its own specific style guide that must be strictly adhered to, or the links will be removed. Take a half hour, or an hour, and familiarize yourself with the Wikipedia style and code. Edit a few articles about topics in which you care, so you can see how the user interface works.

Add Meaningful Information:

As mentioned earlier, it is not enough to just add a link to content that supports information that already exists in the article. Rather, the editing community at Wikipedia expects that something new will be added to the information in the article, with your link to your business article as the citation. The easiest way to add new information is to read the Wikipedia article, find one or two bits of information that you supply in your business article that aren’t in the Wikipedia page, and add those to the page. This may be as little as one or two sentences, or as much as a paragraph. Just make sure to add an in-text citation with the link back to your information on your site.

Use Credible, High-Authority Sources:

When the Wikipedia editing community looks through new additions to pages, they want to see that the newly added information and link is high quality. Make sure that you list at least three resources to .edu and .gov sites at the end of your research article to support your research or business findings. Also, cite sources within the body of the business article whenever it makes sense. This is as easy as saying something like, 

“According to a 2010 report issued by the Department of Health and Human Services…” This tells readers you have done the research that backs up the information in your page. In return, this also demonstrates to the Wikipedia community that the research you linked to has supporting documentation, and indeed adds value for their readers.

These suggestions will help you establish links and credibility on one of the most read websites in the world. While citing your content on Wikipedia takes more effort and time than promoting on social networks or commenting on blogs, the value over time is strong and worth the time. Combining several of the promotion techniques is the best way to get the most from every piece of content you publish.

Good Product Manager Vs Bad Product Manager!

People always accuse me for getting involved too much with product. I want to know basic of every component of product development before suggesting improvement in other’s work. Moreover, I would always wish that my team respect me for my domain knowledge and not for position, i am holding. I recently came across a post on goodproductmanager.com  and would love to share experts from the post, which mostly endorse my ideas on product management. I hope you will find the post useful. Let me know your inputs through comment section.

If you want to be a bad product manager, have someone else do the dirty work for you. You’re important (your title includes “manager,” after all) and you’ve got important things to do, like go to meetings and create presentations. You can’t be bothered with doing the “little things” like following up on customer questions, maintaining communication with partners, or interfacing with all the different functions within your company.

If you want to be a good product manager, be comfortable getting involved in all aspects of your product. Ignoring issues which demand further scrutiny is a sure-fire way to miss important details, hurt your credibility among the product development team and other internal stakeholders, and reduce your overall effectiveness as a product manager.

Product managers should know how to and spend time with activities like:

• Follow up with a customer after a salesperson reports a customer complaint during a sales call
• Getting to the root cause of strange problems being reported by customer support
• Working out details of the implications of product plans with internal groups like finance, legal, and sales operations
• Conducting customer interviews personally (as opposed to delegating this to other internal or external resources)

Often product managers do not get involved in these activities because either they do not know how to do them, are not comfortable doing them, believe that their other duties are more important, or feel though they are “above” doing some of these activities.

This is not to say that a product manager should be involved in all of the “none of the above” tasks at all times. Often, product managers fail because they are perceived as the person who should do all of the miscellaneous work, or they spend too much time in tactical responsibilities rather than delegating those. However, product managers should get involved in some details from time to time for a number of reasons:

1. It will help you identify things related to the product which you would not find out if someone else carried out the task. Yes, a customer service representative can follow up with a major customer to find out more details about the error they received, and they will do a good job of it — but they may only be focused on identifying more out about the error and when it occurred. If you follow up, you will (should) also probe more to learn the scenario which led to the customer performing the task which caused the error, how often that customer performs that task, the broader scenario surrounding that task, the value your product provides by solving the customer need, and a long list of other information which you would not have learned by delegating the follow-up to someone else.
2. It will give you credibility with your colleagues. There is nothing which turns off colleagues more than responding to a request they feel is completely reasonable with a response that you do not have time for their request, that their request is not important, or that the request is “not my job.” Implying that you are “too good” to do something (but your colleague is not) is a recipe for disaster for product managers, whose success depends on influencing people over whom they do not have authority. When you can go the extra mile and help them out with a problem, show them that their request is important, act courtesly and respectfully, and finish what you started in a timely fashion, your colleague will be more than willing to return the favor at some point in the future. (Bonus points if you genuinely thank them for the opportunity to get involved and for their assistance along the way.)
3. It will help make you a better product manager by teaching you about other areas of the business. By “rolling up your sleeves” and diving into different areas within your organization, you will make yourself more knowledgeable about the overall operations of your company and about the various aspects of business in general. The more you learn about the manufacturing operations, the supply chain, the CRM system, or the human resources policies (yes, even HR), the more well-rounded you will become, making you a more valuable product manager for your organization and a more marketable product manager overall.

Finding the right balance is important — too much time spent in the details will take time and attention away from important strategic responsibilities, though avoiding all of the details will shield you from important information which can help enlighten your strategic responsibilities. Product managers who are comfortable getting involved in all aspects of their product and can devote the right amount of time to these details will undoubtedly be more valuable and successful product managers in the long run.

What Google+ Business Profiles is going to be?

Does anyone know what Google+ Business Profiles is going to be? Currently only the Beta testers and Google are aware of what that is; however there has been some speculation as to the likely outcomes. Considering the clout of Google’s Search engine it is very much predictable that Google Business Profile will be of immense importance for small businesses. Google may assign good weightage to Google+ business profiles in their search engine ranking. Although people have started writing off the Google+, I still have some hope that it will get a major boost with launch of business profile page.

While that is not a detailed breakdown of what the profiles will look like, or the precise functionality, there are a number of hints to the goal that Google has in mind for Business Profiles.

1.   Brand-Consumer Communication: Google has always had the interest in providing information to the world. The relative transparency is one of the many aspects of Google the not only fan boys, but the general public have appreciated. By encouraging businesses to have the simplistic communication channel through a Business Profile, they are encouraging the same information transparency. It may not seem like much, but the goals are reached one step at a time.

2.       Targeted Search Ads: While Facebook makes overwhelming amounts of money from its personalized ad targeting, Google essentially invented targeted web advertising. The analytics engines and ad engines are in place to offer a competitive compliment or alternative to Facebook ad budgets. Google’s true power over Facebook, in regards to ads, is the search memory that it can apply to ads. Facebook is only able to target individuals based on their submitted interests. Google will be able to harness what they searched for as well.

3.   Optimized Google Application Integration: While not all products launched from Google have been successes (Google Wave, Catalogs, Video), others have by overwhelming margins. The cloud nature of Google Docs or the ease of function and navigation of Google Maps have made the search giant much more than a search giant. Google can provide these integrations into Business Profiles so that users can easily get information from business profiles.

Reference: This blog post is written by Vinaytosh Mishra for www.saltsocial.com a leading Social Media Marketing Product Development Company from Bangalore, India. 

SlideShare Media Creation Tips!

If you want to search/share serious content around a subject SlideShare is the best place to be. Professionals from many niches upload their content, while other viewers consume the content either landing directly on website or through search engines.

Features of SlideShare:

 1.       Members can have their content uploaded to the site and embed their own personal website or blog

 2.       Content can also be shared privately

 3.    Can be used as an effective marketing tool in helping to promote or advertise an event

 4.SlideShare openly promotes users getting together to create their own groups so that they can interact with people who share the same niche interest as them.

Advantages of SlideShare Coverage:

1.       The single most important aspect and advantage of utilizing SlideShare is that every piece of media uploaded to the site can be viewed by their over 70 million viewers per month.

2.       Users can niche network by creating or joining existing groups. This can help increase contacts, and therefore opportunities.

3.       While being a part of a group can have many networking and marketing benefits, SlideShare user groups can also collectively modify and even enhance current online content.

SlideShare Media Creation Tips:

1.       Go Visual: Use a lot more visual markers and easy to understand symbolism as opposed to more text. Plain and simple, human beings prefer to be visually engaged if the other option is mounds of jumbled text.

2.       Keep it Short: Try to get to the point of your content quickly. Rambling discourse and biased opinions are unlikely to garner increasing views or ‘word of mouth’ consumers.

3.       Precision Tagging: At the end of each upload users are given the opportunity to choose their content descriptions as well as adding their tags, or keywords. Use keyword tools such as Google’s keyword tool to find the best keywords to describe your content or product.

4.       Call to Action: If your content is one of your marketing tools you will definitely want to supply a ‘call-to-action’ at the end of each presentation. A link to click or short advertisement for your product is sufficient and over promotion may have negative impact. 

References: This blog post  was written by Vinaytosh Mishra for Webbazaar.com .The blog contains experts from www.digitalbrandmarketing.com,www.techcrunch.com,www.slideshare.net and www.mashable.com 

SlideShare Launches New HTML5 Website!

Everyone is preparing for the mobile and tablet revolution, it seems. On this blog we shared our thought on motive of Amazon’s tablet friendly site. Now it’s turn of SlideShare. The new HTML5 SlideShare site now renders 30 percent faster and users can view, share, and interact with presentations. The latest version of the SlideShare site uses a patent-pending document conversion technology that renders all the details of a PowerPoint or Word document using nothing but HTML5.

The site also allows visitors to take advantage several features that were previously available only on the desktop version of the site including the ability to copy and paste text; keyboard navigation; full-screen view; and the ability to view embedded documents. Registered users can also view private content, to view content from friends, and favorite content. Any user viewing a slide view page now has visibility into metadata such as the number of views, embeds, and favorites for each presentation, as well as related content and content by the same author. And the homepage now displays a list of featured presentations.

SlideShare continues to see growing engagement, and expects the HTML5 platform to increase usage as well. The selection of HTML5 over native application made sense because the company wanted a lightweight experience for users and wanted documents, fonts, and more to look the same on various browser types. 

Reference: This blog was written by Vinaytosh Mishra for Neev Technologies .

1. www.techcrunch.com 
2. www.mashable.com

Terminator is Releasing Soon!

In a recent announcement to AdWords users on Friday, Google announced that "all non-clickable phone numbers displayed in AdWords ad text will be automatically converted into a Click-to-call number." The update means that if you have a phone number in your PPC ad copy on Google Search or on the Display Network, it could look something like this:

When you click the phone number, it will automatically start dialing if you're on your mobile phone. Also, you will be charged the normal cost-per-click (CPC) whether the phone number is clicked or the title of the ad in general is clicked.

If user gets an option of free call using Google Call option, it will result in new era in B2B Marketing. I have worked with India Mart for their Catalog page Project and can sense real danger for them. The companies like Alibaba and IndiaMart need to think seriously about their value proposition before it become too late.

Email Marketing: Metrics and Measures-IV

Unsubscribe rate

Unsubscribers are recipients who no longer want to receive your email.

Calculation Method:

Total number of unsubscribe/Total number of emails sent

Average Unsubscribe Results:

1. For a regularly mailed list expect between 0.20%-0.75%

2.For a less frequently mailed list expect between 2%-5%

Tips to lower Unsubscribe:

1.Mail only to opted in addresses

2.Keep mailing frequency regular, once per month at least is recommended

3.Remind recipients how they signed up to be on the mailing list

4.Mail only the promised or request content

5.Provide value

Email Marketing: Metrics and Measures-III

Bounce rate


The bounce rate is the percent of emails returned from the recipient’s ISP. There are two type of bounces:

Hard bounce: An email is returned because of a permanent condition like an invalid email address.
Soft bounce: An email is returned because of a temporary condition like the recipient’s in-box is full or a server is down

Calculation Method:

Total number of bounces/Total number of emails sent

Average Bounce Rates:

1.For a regularly mailed list expect between .2% .5%

2.For a less frequently mailed list expect between 5%-7%

3.First time mailing lists can be as high as 20%-30%

Tips to lower the Bounce Rate:

1.Mail regularly to keep list clean and stay in your recipients mind

2.Provide value in your emails that will be missed if email address changes

3.Mail a postcard or call a recipient to let them know their email bounced and how they can provide a new one

Email Marketing: Metrics and Measures-II

Click Through Rate:

The click-through rate (CTR) is the percent of unique recipients who click on one or more links in your email.

Calculation Method:

Total number of clicks on a link/Total number of emails sent

Average Click through Rates:

1.Prospect Mailings are from 1% - 3%

2.B2B clicks average around 7%

3.B2C clicks average around 6%

4.Non-Profit clicks average around 4%

Tips for Better CTR:

1.Include lots of links for your recipients to click

2.Keep important copy near the top and in the preview sheet

3. Use a call-to-action button to encourage clicks

4. Provide Link for images

5.Use targeted segments of your list for better response

6.Test what your recipients will click on

7.Keep the “From Label” consistent and use Company Name or who your recipients expect to hear from

Email Marketing: Metrics and Measures-I

Open Rate:

The open rate is the percent of emails actually viewed by your recipients.

Calculation Method:

Total emails opened/total emails send

Average Open Rates:

1.Prospect mailings as low as 11% - 13%

2.B2B opens average around 22%

3.B2C opens average between 15% - 20%

4.Non-Profit average around 15%

Tips for better Open Rate:

1.Mail at least once per month to stay top of mind with your recipients

2. Maintain expectations about content and deliver what you promised

3. Use strong subject lines and pre-header text to get your recipients attention in the inbox

4. Keep them From Label consistent and use Company Name or who your recipients expect to hear from

F-Shaped Pattern and Website Layout Suggestions!

Website layout is like map of a house. As we plan a house according to inhabitant, web layout should also be plan after taking user’s behavior in account.

As indicated back in April of 2006 by the Nielsen group, readers focus hard at the top left corner, and progressively less to the right and down the page. This means that you’ve got a relatively small piece of your total real-estate to both get your readers hooked on your content and to teach them how to use your site.

Users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:

·Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F's top bar.

·Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F's lower bar.

· Finally, users scan the content's left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F's stem.

Marketing Takeaway:

Users won't read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. You need to optimize the content accordingly to users’ behavior. The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. The information in left column has greater probability of getting spotted, hence placing entry points (links, navigation bar, notice etc.) is recommended.

Social Marketing ROAD Map:Marketing Sherpa

Research: Gather intelligence on target audiences, social use and competition.

Stop, look and listen – it’s the first step to an effective social marketing strategy. Profile your target audiences and their social characteristics. Monitor their dialog and how preferred platforms are used. Benchmark brand popularity, share of voice and other qualitative and quantitative social metrics for your company and competitors. This is also an opportunity to assess your organization’s existing resources, communities and digital assets that may add value to your strategy.

Objectives: Define objectives aligned with target audiences and social metrics.

Forget about soft objectives like “increasing awareness.” Achieving hard, measurable and targeted objectives is the only way to win over social marketing skeptics who control the budgets within your organization. Segment, select and prioritize target audiences by social status. When possible, align objectives with metrics traceable to financials like ROI, cost-per-lead and sales conversions rather than qualitative measures such as sentiment. There are a variety of free tools (Google Analytics, Social Mention, etc.) and commercial analytical solutions for providing the quantitative tracking data required.

Actions: Create a social marketing strategy with a tactical plan of action.

Once you have established targeted and measurable objectives, you will need to plot a course of action toward achieving the desired outcomes. This section will specify the social marketing tactics, implementation timetables, campaigns and best practices, roles and responsibilities, policies and procedures, and budgets your strategy will require. It will also define your social marketing architecture – the pathways for connecting target audiences and conversations to content hubs, landing pages and conversion points.

Devices: Select platforms by their tactical effectiveness and architectural fit.

An effective strategy is expected to outlive the brief lifespan of today’s popular social platforms. Therefore, your ROAD Map to this point has been technology brand-agnostic. But now is the time to identify, assess and select the appropriate social platforms (Devices) that effectively fit into your current social marketing architecture. If a social network is appropriate, will it be Facebook or LinkedIn? Do you need to build a private customer service forum or will a Twitter account be a better solution? These are the final questions your strategy will answer.

Social Media Sentiment:Baba Ramdev and Delhi Police

People love to express themselves .They love to showcase themselves as opinion leader and that is the reason behind “Nukkadbazi”or “Addebazi”. Since my childhood days I have been participated in Nukkad/pantry conversations actively. These places are now replaced by Face book, blog and Twitter.

On 5^th June 2011, some of the trending keywords for Twitter in India were:

1. Delhi Police
2. Dehradun
3. Jallianwala Bagh

Need not to say these keywords are related to the “Baba Ramdev’s crusade against black money. When we check Google Trend for Baba Ramdev the above hypothesis gets some support.

Inference:

Sentiments of Twitter users are against the police action against Baba and some of them are comparing the act with “Jalianwala Bagh Massacre”.

Google Wallet mobile-payment system:Will it be a success?

What does Google need to do to make its Google Wallet mobile-payment system a success?

Answer is simple:” Give people confidence. Then make it a habit”.

Think about it. So many slight modifications to our daily lifestyle mean so many millions to manufacturers, especially as they’re repeated, day in and day out. And, once established, the cycle self-perpetuates.

There are four problems that need to be solved to assure consumer confidence in Google Wallet.

1. Customers need to be assured that if they lose their phone; they won’t give a thief access to their bank account.

2. The carrier needs to convince the customer that their bank account won’t be vulnerable, period.

3. Compatibility can’t be an issue but user has to be assured that their checks (and debit cards) can be used at any ATM.

4. If this is a digital wallet - make it one. Include a clear sleeve on the back for a driver’s license or other ID.

Make it a habit

Consumers need to feel comfortable with tapping their phones. To do that, ICICI, HSBC, Citibank and Google need to establish a habit. How? Discounts, discounts, discounts. But only if you tap. Movie tickets? At Rs 100 discount at your local Mall, for those who use Google Wallet.

Top metrics used for measuring social marketing impact

The goal of social media monitoring is to gain a better understanding of the potential target audiences in your social sphere, where they are and what interests them. Monitoring will also help benchmark important metrics for social media objectives.

Marketing Sherpa a leader in Market Research wanted to learn more about what organizations track to quantify the impact of social media marketing. Find out the results from a survey of more than 3,300 marketers in this chart.

This blogpost was written for www.saltsocial.com/blog the Market Leader in Social Media Analytics through Product Radr.

Managing Separate Blogs!

I own two blogs, one each for professional and personal blogging. The target audience for both blogs is entirely different. My poem blog www.vinaytosh.blogspot.com is on free domain and support Hindi fonts while my professional blog www.vinaytosh.com is more professional in look.

When running multiple blogs, it’s important to have a clear separation from one blog to the next. Each blog should have a clear focus. Otherwise, how will you know which blog should contain a certain type of post?

If you have several multi-topic blogs, you may find that some of them get neglected, or they suffer from poor quality content as you post on them just to keep them somewhat up to date.

There’s very little reason to set up multiple blogs if you don’t have different things to say on each one.

At Digital Musketeers we spend a lot of time in researching our clients need and maintain recency as well as frequency in our blog posts.

Happy B'day Facebook Like Button!

On 21st of April 2011 Facebook celebrated the one year anniversary of one of its most important product launches, the Like Button. To commemorate the one year anniversary of the Like Button Facebook released some interesting data about the button's usage in its first year.

1. 10,000 websites integrate with Facebook each day

2. More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook

3. Over half of the 25 fastest growing U.S. retail sites use Facebook

4. Media sites that adopt the Like button average a greater than 300% increase in referral traffic from Facebook

5. Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook on external websites

Reference: http://www.facebook.com/facebook

Process of Email Marketing !

Hi Folks!

I hope you are doing fine! It is start of financial year and every business was busy in making plans for next quarter and now it’s time for some real stuff. I hope this blog will help you in your day to day needs. In case you have any specific questions about online marketing you can always write me on Vinaytosh@gmail.com .

In last post we talked about the macro strategy for email campaigns, in this post I would write on implementation side of it. For me it is a six step process:

Step 1: Define the objective of campaign as well as the target audience you want to tract.

Step 2: Start from a much targeted list prepared by organic methods. To keep it simple:” Never buy an email list”. It won’t help in long run.

Step 3: Ask for permission to collect email address and provide them unsubscribe option as well. Provided them freedom. If they don’t speak for you they will not speak against you as well.

Step 4: Prepare a landing page with call to action for target audience.

Step 5: Refine your campaign for people who have interacted.

Step 6: Depending on second campaign pass the inbound leads to direct sales team.

How to measure Social Media ROI?

As a marketer you have spent few dollars on social media efforts and now time has come to show the results or at least management thinks so. To sustain your professional career as well as relevancy of your profile you need to show results and you don’t know how to measure it.

Don’t worry; I am here to help you out. First of all, investment should never be made without having objective in mind. Define the objective and that should be aligned with business metrics. Now let’s accept the fact that Social Media is not a direct contributor to top line of business but it is enhancer. If we talk in term of AIDA model, Social Media plays a vital role till third step but purchase occurs through direct marketing or sales channel only.

But you can analyze social media contribution using A/B split testing. A/B testing, split testing or bucket testing is a method of marketing testing by which a baseline control sample is compared to a variety of single-variable test samples in order to improve response rates. Before starting any social media campaign measure the initial state (of business metrics) and then measure it again at end of campaign the difference is result of social media campaign.

Social Media Measurement Buckets

In earlier section, I just talked about A/B Split testing or bucket testing. Now I am going to share six major buckets to examine.

Business Metrics

These are things such as leads, new email subscribers, sales and donations. You can create campaigns and see which links/posts to social sites are driving the most conversions.

Share of Voice and Sentiment

In social media, share of voice refers to the number of conversations about your brand vs. your competitors/market. To do this, you’ll want to use a monitoring program that can help you keep track of all conversations about your brand and your competitors over a given time period.

When looking at all these mentions you’ll want to make sure to track which ones are positive, negative and neutral, so you can assign a weight to each of these categories and calculate your average sentiment. To get share of voice, you divide the number of conversations about your brand by the total number of conversations about brands in your market.

Awareness

A few things that may work as metrics for online awareness include:

• Amount of website traffic/site visits/page views
• Number of searches for brand terms
• Video and content views

Engagement

Engagement is the extent to which people interact with you and your content. Some signs of engagement include:

• Likes (of a Face book page and of your content)
• Shares
• Mentions (positive, negative, neutral)
• Blog comments
• Ratings
• Retweets
• Email opens and clicks complaints, etc. Don’t forget about email, as your participation on social sites can have a positive (or negative, if you’re doing it wrong) impact on your numbers here.

Influence

Influence is the likelihood that what you’re doing inspires action. Some signals of influence may include:

• Number of (and quality of) inbound links to your content
• Likelihood that emails drive actions
• Likelihood that Twitter links are retweeted or commented on
• Likelihood that Facebook posts will be commented on and liked
• Likelihood that content will be shared/liked (and to what extent)

Popularity

Online popularity is essentially just the number of people subscribed to your content. Some people always say it’s all about the quality of your following, not the quantity. That’s true to some extent; however if you’re looking for advertisers or sponsors to partner with on social programs, having 10,000 followers on Twitter looks a lot better than having 500. Some examples of online popularity signals include:

• Number of email subscribers
• Number of followers on Twitter
• Number of members of a LinkedIn group
• Number of people who like your Facebook page

I hope these buckets serve as helpful starting points for you. Keep checking our blog for more information about Social Media Marketing and Social Media Tools.

References:

http://socialmediatoday.com

http://www.mashable.com

http://www.wikipedia.org