How to measure your social media marketing campaign

1. Lead Generation: Every time you have a favorable interaction with someone during social networking that could be a potential customer (for example if someone RTs (re-tweet) you, sends you a message, you answer their LinkedIn question, etc.), write down their contact information. Follow-up as you would with a lead you’ve gotten during face-to-face networking. You are now able to measure your social media marketing campaign by lead generation.

2. Customer Service: Many companies with thousands of customers now use Twitter as a customer service center. Companies can respond to customers via a Twitter customer service account and are answered quickly. A corporate Twitter account is free, so it costs you less on a per customer interaction basis than more traditional customer service management tools (like a call center or pricey software). You might have a more satisfied customer as well because they didn’t have to wait on hold for ten minutes.

3. Website Traffic: Look at the number of hits to your website before and after you’ve started a social media marketing campaign. If your social media marketing efforts are successful, you’ll see a spike in traffic. If you know your website conversion rate, you can now measure the ROI of your campaign.

4. SEO: Google your company name before your social media marketing efforts and then look at it just three months later. I guarantee that your results are more favorable if you’ve been running a good social media marketing campaign. Also, if you’ve optimized your social network accounts and linked them to your website, your search engine ranking has probably also improved.

Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone video interview

Co-founder Biz Stone calls Twitter the messaging service we didn’t know we needed until we had it.

View this hilarious interview on the Colbert Nation Show, and tell us what you think about Twitter’s business model?   Value vs. Profit…

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Biz Stone

Avoid the Pitfalls of Social Networking

Below is an interesting article I would like to share with our blog visitors. This article was found from our http://www.entrepreneur.com RSS feed. Enjoy.

An online presence is a great way to connect with people, but remember: Everything you write or say online can be found . . . and held against you.

The internet provides an impressive way to connect with people (in essence leveling the playing field for home based business owners). Incorporating social networking into your business’s marketing plan will pay off tremendously. Many entrepreneurs participate in socially geared networking forums as well as business networking forums; the caveat is both reflect heavily on you and, by association, your business. Therefore, it’s important to realize the potential impact of your online activity on your business.

Social networking sites are a great way to stay in touch with family and friends, but remember the content published here is accessible by others. This includes people with whom you do business. Even though you may have separate sites/accounts that seemingly split your business and personal online personas, anybody could easily access the information on your personal site prior to doing business with you. For example, many HR departments Google candidates’ names to obtain additional information about them during the hiring process. So why wouldn’t a CEO turn to Google before entering into a business relationship with a person or company?

Keep anything you write on the web professional. Someone wanting to do business with you doesn’t want to witness you using vulgar language or discrediting another person or business on an online forum. Once it’s out there, it’s hard to take it back. Also, any pictures posted should be kept to those you’d feel comfortable sharing with your grandmother. Log-in names should also be kept professional; don’t use names or terms that might hurt your image.

Blogs are a popular way to add frequent content to your site. It drives traffic to your site and is a useful tool to inform your visitors of issues and trends. If you use a blog to promote your business, it should mirror your business and its website. Formal businesses, such as financial planners, should keep their content focused on business recommendations, financial advice, etc. If you have a website geared toward children’s items, it would be appropriate to have your website more lighthearted.

Sharing links on blogs is another popular way to increase website traffic, but caution should be taken regarding what websites you link to from your blog. If they change their blog content and it ends up being something racy or provocative, you probably don’t want to be associated with that type of activity.

There are so many forums out there, but we tend to become comfortable communicating with a particular individual or group of people. Even though you may think you know these people, remember, you really don’t know them. Be careful with the information you share. Proceed with caution when asking for feedback regarding a business decision or idea so as not to divulge privileged information. Some people participate in these forums to capture ideas from people who’ve invested lots of time and energy into their product development.

It’s important for PR purposes to utilize social networking sites, but it’s just as important to be smart about how you utilize them.

Author: Lesley Spencer Pyle is the founder and president of HomeBasedWorkingMoms.com

7 Blog Benefits for Business Owners

7 Blog Benefits for Business Owners

• It reinforces the idea that you are an expert in your field.
• It helps pull a community of like-minded people together
• You get useful feedback from people who have bought or might buy your product.
• It increases the likelihood that the media can find you and write about your products.
• ZDNet Research reports that 67 percent of journalists use blogs as sources to find industry experts.
• It helps develop the brand story so that people can tell others about you and generate further leads.
• The content is always fresh, so your business demonstrates that you are active and responsive.
• It generates traffic to your website and any other links you include on your blog.

What is all this Twitter stuff about?

According to Twitter.net, “Twitter is a social networking and micro blogging service that allows you answer the question, “What are you doing?” by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called “tweets”, to your friends, or “followers.”

Web Consultant, Africa Riviera of YourHostSolutions.com recently joined Twitter.com and is very excited to network and share messages other Twitters. It would be a benefit to follow Africa because she shares good online marketing tips to business owners!

Here are 5  twitter tips for businesses: 1. Helps your SEO and search-engine rankings try to use your most effective keywords in your tweets and track your links to your landing pages that has a specific call-to-action. Some great URL shortening and tracking tools are compared on Search Engine Land. 2. Monitor what people are saying about you. You can monitor the tweets about you by searching for your ID, company name, industry segment and by watching @ replies. 3. Make interesting tweets. Like most other things on the web, one way to get people to follow you is to post information they want to know about. 4. Have a goal for using Twitter and a way to measure how you’re doing at achieving that goal. Guy Kawasaki, suggested one good tool for doing that is Retweetist, which shows how many times you’ve been retweeted. (A retweet is when someone repeats what you said so people they know will see it.) 5. Copy best practices. On Twitter that means looking at how other companies are effectively using Twitter to engage with their customers and build buzz. JetBlueAirways and Amazondeals were two of the good examples on Twitter.

Common Craft explains in ‘Plain English’ what Twitter is all about.
Check out their video below.