There are a lot of people saying that they make money from social media. Social tools are not expected to go away and more people than ever use them on a continuous basis.
You’ll find an endless number of blog posts and articles as well as e-books and paid systems that promise to help you learn to make money online via social media.
You probably already know that you should be taking advantage of this method of online marketing but how do you know if your tactics are working? Here are a few tips to help you measure social media success.
Social Media Success – Look At Your Analytics
Once you’ve been using social media for a while, you should start seeing traffic that comes from it. Your website analytics can tell you if that traffic is coming from Twitter or from Facebook links, etc.
You can also use tools like the Bit.ly that not just help you shorten your links but that also tell you how many people click a particular link that you’ve posted.
Don’t forget to check your replies on Twitter to see if people are re-tweeting your posts, which is a great sign that your Twitter followers are listening and valuing what you have to say.
Look At Your Number Of Subscribers
If you are using a tool like Twitter to get people to subscribe to your newsletter, you can watch your RSS subscribers list and see how many people are on that list. After doing some social marketing, you might see that number start to grow, showing you that your efforts are getting noticed.
If you’re on Twitter, for instance, and you are following 5,000 people but only have 50 followers, perhaps your social marketing tactics aren’t very effective. But as you see your number of followers grow, you can see that these efforts are bearing fruit.
If you’ve started a Facebook fan page and see that your number of fans is growing, you can ascertain that this has been a good focus of your time and effort and is contributing to your overall social media success.
Google / Bing Yourself
If your name is your brand (or by Googling your brand), Googling / Binging yourself will show you whether or not your social media profiles are being found. You can also check your rankings to see what social activities are being indexed in search engines.
Increased traffic is another benefit of social media optimisation and you can not just be found on those sites but found through social search engines as well. Backlinks from these sites can definitely help you get qualified traffic.
Measuring your social media success will help you in several ways. It can help you determine where to spend your time and energy and even if you’re not seeing progress in terms of money yet, you can often see that it is still paying off in terms of traffic and increased subscribers that can be a good step toward increased profits.
About Sean Rasmussen
Google Alerts are a great way to identify if your name (brand) is being searched for. You can then track down any links that users are following and help to build a more pronounced branding for yourself.
Not sure whether Yahoo, Bing or other SE’s have any similar service.
Google Alerts sure is a great way to keep track of anything you are interested in for sure Cemil…including yourself! Thanks for the reminder mate
Regards – Sean
I have Google alerts active – you turn up often Sean, but I never thought of adding myself! LOL
Well, there are a lot of Lina Nguyen’s out there, and I’m proud to say, I rank #1 on google for my own name! LOL! This wasn’t the case before I was IM’ing, so at least I can say I rank #1 for something!
Hi Lina
).
It’s fun finding out you are #1 for your own name. When I first started with YOTA and I googled my own name it would always ask me if I meant “Talia Shipman”. Now I come up with no prompts and I am #1 (and 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6
I am trying to use the social media well and properly. I have joined most of them. My problem is using them all effectively. The 24 hour day is really old fashioned and it just doesn’t cater for the necessities of modern internet life. Surely it is time to increase it to some useful size, say 50 hour days.
However, I am going to take your advice and start tracking and see if I can discover which of the various things I try to keep updated have had any effect.
Twitter and Facebook seem to be the forefront of my efforts, but I will start looking at utilizing the other places I have joined.
Thanks for the push and shove.
Hi Dobbs
I think we could all use a 50 hr day sometines however it’s about using the time we have, concentrating on the areas that bring us success and maintaining them, then looking at the areas that aren’t and work on why they aren’t.
Sean
Wow. There is 669 pages of me on Google. Gotta love that.
Update Sean
I’ve got away to go to get to your 29,000 pages
Hi Sean,
I need to work on my networking and socializing skills. I use Google Analytics to see which social media sites I’m getting traffic to my blog from. I tend to spend most of my time on the sites that send me the most traffic.
I guess the flip-side of this is I also get to see which sites I need to really work on.
Hi Sean
I don’t exist on Google yet but that is because I haven’t finished my blog.
I really like this post on measuring my social media success, it has so many fantastic ideas that I will be able to use once I am up and running.
Thank you Sean.
You probably exist there if you have published something.
I haven’t published anything so that is why.
I was in there when I was active in art exhibitions but I think I have been archived somewhere by now.
Hi Sean,
This is very interesting I have just checked where I am on google I checked it for the keyword phrase “A total travel experience” and I am thrilled and excited to see I am #4 for that key phrase out of 10,100,00 YEAH
Like Rita, I just went to Google and entered ‘pruning roses’ which I know I had a lot of traffic up to about mid June – and hey, its on page 1 (#7).
I used the USA as this is where most of the traffic to my website comes from.
“10 top tips for growing roses successfully” gets #2 and #3 on page 1 – with a little blue cross that says show more results for my site! Never seen that before.
Well done Peter, great results
Sean, great tips on how to measure your Social Media success. I was so happy when I had 100 twitter followers, now I’m over 500 and when I get RT’d it’s still exciting for me. I haven’t checked out properly the RSS subscribers so that’s next on the list