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If you are an internet marketer or publisher, chances are you're comfortable with the power of social networking optimization (SMO). In case you are a new comer to the concept of Internet marketing, you will be interested to know that this breakthrough method is a totally inexpensive (practically free) way to create buzz about your products, get more traffic to your website, build trust concerning your company, and boost your sales.

Today, I'll explain to you a simple method of getting started in social media marketing - and a straightforward three-step process you can use to measure how well it's working.

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

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

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

Measurement Wiki - Recently, we started leveraging a good our individual team members on LinkedIn. If you aren't knowledgeable about this site, it's a network community for professionals. Users can create profiles highlighting their corporate experience and special areas of practice.

Our search engine marketing tactics specialists answers select questions about LinkedIn which can be related to his area of expertise. He also uploads blog posts about a selection of search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), pay-per-click (PPC), and social networking practices. It will help create buzz about we (through this person's profile and position at our company). Plus, he sometimes supplements his posts with backlinks to relevant articles on our website - which helps drive traffic towards our website site.

This can be a practice you can emulate easily. Simply register being a part of one of the social media marketing groups. Then commence to have fun playing the discussions. As an example, if your LinkedIn member posts a specific question about SEO, our SEO specialist will try to find articles on our website that addresses that issue. Then he answers the issue in the own words, but recommends how the member also browse the article, that has worth more information. By answering questions presented by your fellow members (making certain you add relevant links back to content on your website), your posts will begin to generate "free" traffic.

Another site that work well for all of us is StumbleUpon.com. This website directs Online surfers to Web pages based on the surfer's pre-selected categories if he or she go through the "Stumble" icon on the toolbar.

You are able to install the StumbleUpon toolbar all on your own computer and recommend articles by yourself site. This enables you to give any page a "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down" rating. It also enables you to include a description and category for your submission. Should you rate your article, it will come in the StumbleUpon rotation - which, again, means 'free' traffic to your website.

Starting is super-easy. The answer to earning social networking do the job is similar with any marketing medium: You must have a means to determine if it's working.

Although a lot of marketers have been going all out with their social networking efforts, most haven't an idea concerning how to actually appraise the campaign's failure or success.

Measurement Wiki - Let's imagine my company just published a write-up on goal setting techniques for 2009. The content is accompanied by a connected product ad in our daily eletter, in addition to by a separate e-mail promotion to get a related setting goals product, like our Total Success Achievement program. Income are produced by the e-mail and from the ad. Meanwhile, the social networking aspect gets control of.

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

So how would you appraise the social media marketing facet of this kind of effort?

It is easy. Using the same metrics that are utilized to measure a pr effort: Outputs, outcomes, and objectives - things i want to call the "3 O's."

1. Outputs (measures effectiveness and efficiency)

For your example, I'd take a look at Google Analytics for spikes in traffic to our homepage dads and moms pursuing the article's publication. I'd look specifically at traffic sources, visits, unique visits, and visit percentages. I'd also look at referring sites and appearance engines to determine if the visitors are coming straight from social media marketing platforms. And I'd look for a rise in new subscriber sign-ups (leads) in that same time period.

2. Outcomes (measures behavioral changes)

Because of this metric, I'd examine feedback from our customers... e-mails, calls, comments posted on our member forum. I'd also perform some reputation monitoring by searching the internet for keywords like my company's name, the article title, as well as the product name to find out if others were discussing it in forums, external forums, and bulletin boards.

3. Objectives (measures business objectives/sales)

Measurement Wiki - The most apparent and proportional metric is network marketing from the product which are associated with the editorial. Orders produced by an e-mail link or ad link are coded for tracking, so attributing sales to those sources is definitive. In the event the sales come from something page on our website the location where the true "source" can not be tracked, I'd go through the sales throughout the corresponding dates with the campaign for correlations.

Finally, for every of the aforementioned, I might compare the present campaign data versus the year-to-date (YTD) average and year-over-year data to obviously illustrate pre- and post- campaign performance. In other words, I'd take a look at website traffic, unique visits, specific product sales, etc. - all for the similar time periods. This way, I'd have an established benchmark by which to determine our current social media marketing efforts.