Social media ROI and metrics: how do you measure if your campaign is working? And, what is meant by “working” in this context?

It isn’t unusual for a business to jump on the social media bandwagon without really knowing what to expect. After all, it’s often said that “everyone” needs to be on (fill in the blank with Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, YouTube and so forth) and you aren’t to be blamed if you’ve taken the leap without knowing how you’re going to measure social media impact.

According to the 2009 Mzinga & Babson Executive Education report, a report referenced by Brian Solis, 84% of professionals who participate in social media do not measure for return on investment. Here’s the flaw with that. It’s hard to tweak and improve what you don’t quantify – which means that, if you take on the challenge to effectively measure social media efforts, you’ll move ahead of a significant portion of businesses – most likely including some of your competitors.

Once you make the commitment to measure, though, your question probably is – now what?

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What is Google Plus and how does it affect your business?

You’ve probably heard people talking about Google Plus and you may have wondered whether or not this development is important to your business. The reality is that, when you hear that term, people could be chatting about any one of three different (although closely related) things, including the:

1. Google Plus button located by each result in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and/or next to PPC ads
2. Google Plus button appearing on a website
3. Google Plus social media site, which is currently in Beta (invitation only)

Although no one knows all of the ramifications just yet, Google representatives have stated that they expect Google Plus signals to influence ranking, which makes this an important development for virtually all business websites.

According to Google’s David Byttow, “We’ll also start to look at +1’s as one of the many signals we use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, including social signals from other services. For +1′s, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality over time.”

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Social media best practices: what should your company do to benefit from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and other top social media sites?

Each social media campaign is unique, because each business is unique. Still, social media best practices can be used as benchmarks when crafting any campaign.

These social media best practices include:

1. Clearly establish your company goals; they might include to:

• increase website traffic
• engage directly with customers and prospects
• gain valuable sales leads
• obtain new customers
• help content go viral to boost inbound links

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Laser target your audience by using Facebook advertising as one of your core social marketing strategies.

Here’s what is so valuable about Facebook: You determine who you want your ad to show up for based on choosing parameters that people include in their Facebook profile information. Talk about target marketing!

When you set up your Facebook advertising, you can choose from the following target marketing options:

• Geographic Targeting (by state, city or nationwide) – Ad will show only to those people who list themselves as residents of the city/area you specify
• Age Ranges – Ad will show only to those people in the age range you specify
• Birthday – Yes or No option – Ad will show only to those people whose birthday corresponds to the day the ad is running
• Sex – Male or Female
• Keywords – Targets ads to keywords that exist in people’s profiles
• Education Level – Specify what kind of degree they have, if any
• Workplace – To target employees of a specific company
• Relationship – You can target only people in a certain kind of a relationship, i.e.: single, engaged, married
• Interested In – Men or Women
• Language – Target users that speak a language other than English

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Social marketing strategies: how can paid Facebook advertising benefit you?

Facebook is one of the more frequently used social marketing strategies, but did you know about their paid advertising options when it comes to reaching your target demographic? Facebook gives you different options for reaching your intended audience than a search engine does – and it offers options on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis, as well.

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