JuliaLuke49

If you're an internet marketer or publisher, odds are you're comfortable with the effectiveness of social networking optimization (SMO). If you're new to the world of Online marketing, you will end up interested to understand this breakthrough method is a truly inexpensive (practically free) way to create buzz regarding your products, get more traffic to your website, build trust regarding your company, and improve your sales.

Today, I will show you an easy way to get were only available in social media marketing - and a simple three-step process will measure just how it's working.

In a nutshell, social media marketing is an interactive platform where people can correspond - via forums, forums, bulletin boards, networks (such as MySpace, Facebook, Classmates, LinkedIn, Bebo), user-generated content sharing (such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit), wikis (interactive online encyclopedias), and blogs - with like minded those who share similar interests, whatever those interests could be.

Cutting-edge businesses and marketing-centric companies have jumped around the social media marketing bandwagon to leverage the elevated popularity of this phenomenon. Companies small and large got their marketers to produce MySpace, FaceBook, or LinkedIn profiles to be able to get their fingers on the pulse of the market, correspond with consumers, and create buzz regarding their products.

My business continues to be on the net for a while now, dabbling in all sorts of social media activities with content syndication, viral marketing, and online PR efforts.

Measurements of Length - Recently, we started leveraging the existence of our individual associates on LinkedIn. Discover familiar with this site, it's really a network community for business people. Users can setup profiles highlighting their corporate experience and special areas of practice.

One of our search engine marketing tactics specialists answers select queries about LinkedIn that are associated with his specialization. Also, he uploads blogs about a selection of search engine marketing (SEO), search engine marketing techniques (SEM), pay-per-click (PPC), and social networking practices. It will help create buzz about our organization (through this person's profile and position at our company). Plus, he sometimes supplements his posts with links to relevant articles on our website - which assists drive traffic towards our website site.

This can be a practice you are able to emulate easily. Simply register as a member of one of the social media marketing groups. Then start to participate in the discussions. For instance, if your LinkedIn member posts a particular question about SEO, our SEO specialist will endeavour to discover articles on our website that addresses that issue. Then he answers the question as part of his own words, but recommends that the member also browse the article, which has more valuable information. By answering questions resulting from other members (making sure you add relevant links to content on your website), your site content will start to generate "free" traffic.

Another site that works well for us is StumbleUpon.com. This website directs Online surfers to Webpages depending on the surfer's pre-selected categories every time they click on the "Stumble" icon on the toolbar.

It is possible to install the StumbleUpon toolbar on your own computer and recommend articles all on your own site. This lets you give any page a "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down" rating. Additionally, it lets you add a brief description and category for your submission. In the event you rate your article, it's going to can be found in the StumbleUpon rotation - which, again, means 'free' people to your site.

Getting started is super-easy. The answer to creating social media meet your needs is similar with any marketing medium: You'll want a way to determine if it's working.

Although some marketers happen to be going all the way using their social media marketing efforts, most haven't a hint regarding the way to actually measure the campaign's success or failure.

Measurements of Length - Let's say my company just published a write-up on goal setting for 2009. The article is accompanied by a related product ad inside our daily eletter, as well as by way of a separate e-mail promotion to get a related setting goals product, like our Total Success Achievement program. Product sales are generated from the e-mail and from the ad. Meanwhile, the social media marketing aspect gets control.

This article content is syndicated via Bottles, in addition to top article directory sites (like EzineArticles, GoArticles, ArticleBase, Buzzle, and others) and user-generated content networks (including Digg and Reddit). Readers could also discuss the article on goal setting techniques and self-improvement blogs, forums, and bulletin boards.

Now how could you look at the social networking part of this kind of effort?

It's easy. Using the same metrics which can be used to measure a public relations effort: Outputs, outcomes, and objectives - things i prefer to call the "3 O's."

1. Outputs (measures effectiveness and efficiency)

For our example, I'd examine Google Analytics for spikes in people to our homepage mothers and fathers following the article's publication. I'd look specifically at traffic sources, visits, unique visits, and visit percentages. I'd also take a look at referring sites and appearance engines to determine if the traffic is coming from social media marketing platforms. And I'd look for a boost in new subscriber sign-ups (leads) in that same time period.

2. Outcomes (measures behavioral changes)

Because of this metric, I'd take a look at feedback from my customers... e-mails, calls, comments posted on our member forum. I'd also carry out some reputation monitoring by searching the Web for keywords like my company's name, the article title, and the product name to see if others were discussing it in forums, external forums, and bulltinboards.

3. Objectives (measures business objectives/sales)

Measurement Wiki - The obvious and proportional metric is direct selling of the product which are linked with the editorial. Orders generated from an e-mail link or ad link are coded for tracking, so attributing sales to those sources is definitive. If the sales result from something page on our website in which the true "source" can't be tracked, I'd go through the sales during the corresponding dates with the campaign for correlations.

Finally, for every of the aforementioned, I'd compare the current campaign data as opposed to the year-to-date (YTD) average and year-over-year data to obviously illustrate pre- and post- campaign performance. Quite simply, I'd have a look at web site traffic, unique visits, specific product sales, etc. - all for the similar periods of time. This way, I'd come with an established benchmark by which to determine our current social media marketing efforts.