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

Social Media Benefits Comes With “Handle with Care” tag!

Why have social media networks grown so explosively? Unlike the telephone or Internet which began as business communication tools, they were designed for social interaction. They’re the closest thing we have to face-to-face human contact. And they’re as organic as two or three friends meeting at a coffee shop.

Witnessing (wide-eyed, no doubt) the impact social media networking was having on consumer behavior, it didn’t take long before industry and other sectors co-opted it for professional purposes. Smart organizations are seeing the benefits: what better way to establish, retain and grow brand reputation and loyalty than to engage directly with existing and new audiences? Better still, what better way to build customers and audiences than to have them doing your marketing for you? Viral marketing is always the most powerful way to get bottom line results – and the cheapest. If the average Facebook user is connected to 130 friends, and that user mentions your product or service favorably, how much more viral can communication get?

Of course for every benefit, there’s a potential drawback. If that same Facebook user has a bad experience with your product or service and warns their friends about it, your brand can quickly take a beating. Social media networking is a double-edged sword, for sure. But ignoring it is not an option, nor is using it without a plan.

Protect Your Child from Cyber Crime!

Name	Details	Price
Norton Online Family	Parents know exactly what information their kids are looking at on the web. This free tool offers the capability to monitor how your child is presenting him or herself in profile pictures and whether they are over confiding on the site. You can even set a time window for access.	Free, Family Premier-$29.99/year
Piggy Back	The service is certainly rooted in monitoring your child’s online gaming activity, but it does also serve as a way to monitor all online activity, including Facebook.	Free
Safety Web	The product gives you detailed reports and statistics about what information about your kids shows up publicly online, specific areas children frequent most, plus notifications of any potential risks surrounding the young ones’ activities.	$9-$10/month, 1 year plan available for $100
Screen Retriever	Offers the opportunity to watch recorded footage throughout the day and evening. This ensures your kids were not on Facebook at times when they were supposed to be doing other activities, such as homework or even sleeping. You can also create a list of approved sites for them to visit, and block others.	Current Special: Annual Home License-$9.99. Regularly priced at $49
Social Shield	The cloud-based tool quickly allows you to take action on questionable activity immediately as it arises, from using profanity to posting inappropriate pictures.	$10/month, $8/month if paying annually
True Care	Promises to keep your children safe, using some of the same features that the other software in this article have, plus a few notable new additions. You can investigate your child’s friend list to see whether any seem inappropriate, keep track of profile content and all posted pictures of your kids, plus receive alerts for questionable content.	$9.99/month
You Diligence	The product includes many of the features in the other applications described in this article, including notifications, access to information about friends, and monitoring across both computer and mobile services.	$9.99/month per child, $14.99 for all immediate family

10 Inbound Marketing Interview Questions

After my MBA ,I wanted to make my career in Digital Marketing and Online Behavior .I  was convinced that Inbound Marketing is future of marketing,hence i stick to my decision ,even after many contrary views from my close friends.But today situation is quite clear and online marketer is not a poor  SEO or website guy.In fact there are various other profiles like product marketing ,product development,data manager and user interface experts which demand good education and understanding of business.

Following are ten interview questions recommended by Hubspot (www.hubspot.com):

1. Can you explain "insert topic" to me in a simple way? - Inbound marketing is about making your industry interesting and helping to solve customer problems with content. This question is used to make sure that someone can drop industry jargon and communicate a simple idea in a clear and engaging way.


2. What results have you achieved with your current inbound marketing efforts? - Inbound marketing is about growing your business. Make sure that the person can provide solid numbers to showcase their previous work. This also shows that they have an understanding of how to measure inbound marketing efforts. 


3. What do you read online? - Part of inbound marketing is understanding industry news and leveraging for the benefit of the business. Does the person have the right habits in place to do this?


4. How do you drive traffic to your blog (personal/business)? - A business blog is a big part of the inbound marketing process. This question is looking for an understanding of not only writing for a blog, but also growing readership.


5. What part of inbound marketing would you start with for our business? - This question ensures the candidate understands the basics. If the say "social media," when you are getting very little organic search traffic, for example, it demonstrates that they may not be good at seeing the big picture.


6. What is an example of a company that does inbound marketing well and why? - Reverse engineering is an important marketing skill. It is important that you hire a person that knows what success looks like and understands what other businesses have done to be successful.


7. What are five blog post titles you would write for our business? This question is all about understanding how well this person can incorporate inbound marketing into the mix of industry insights.


8. How do you know what type of content to create for our business? - This question tests industry knowledge along with understanding of types of inbound marketing content. Beyond blog posts, the candidate should mention webinars and ebooks.


9. What area of inbound marketing are you least knowledgeable about? It is important to hire a person who understands they don't know it all... This question is all about identifying that level of maturity in someone.


10. How long will it take for us to see results from your inbound marketing efforts? - Regardless of your business, setting the right expectations is critical. You don't want to hire someone that will only tell you what you want to hear. Test the person by making sure they give you reasonable estimates for tactics.

How to get your facebook.com email ?

Right email ID and username are like right real estate properties .I would advise you to claim your preferred identity before anyone else go for it.

Step1:

Log on to your facebook account.

Step 2:

Go to http://www.facebook.com/username

Select your preferred username or you can go for suggestions from facebook.If you have already created username skip this step.

Step 3:

Once you get you username go to following link:

http://www.facebook.com/about/messages

It will prompt you to request an invitation. click on it.

Step 4:

Once you have requested for invitation you are in que. And facebook will send you a message confirming that your facebook email id is created .

Be careful in selecting your username because your facebook email ID is going to be username@facebook.com
once you have your facebook email ID you can start using it on your collaterals.