When you want to determine what social media marketing is doing for your business, you have to know the best way measure the value.

Quality over Quantity
In social marketing, it’s all about who you know, or rather, who knows you. You can have throngs of followers (feels good to be popular, doesn’t it?), but that won’t get you anywhere if your followers aren’t the right followers for you. You want people who pay attention to what you publish, not people who click “hide” as soon as your content starts popping up on their page. Interaction is important, and you can only interact with people who are invested in your company. So, don’t pay someone “social media expert” who says they can get you 500 followers in two days. They’re not getting you who you really want.

Come Out and Play
A solid social media campaign gets people interacting. Sure, it’s great when someone retweets your post–that means you’re putting out quality enough content that one of your followers thinks their followers would like it. But, even better, is getting several of your followers tweeting about your post with each other. Interacting with your moderator – great; interacting with each other – priceless.

Memories in the Corner of My Mind
The great thing about social media is that, unlike an ad that people may see and forget, social media’s levels of interaction tend to make your brand more memorable. While response time might not be immediate, frequent interaction builds an image of your business in potential clients’ minds. You know how frequency can influence you. All you need to see is a Bulls Eye to know it’s Target. Why? Because you’ve seen it a million times. Now, most businesses don’t have Target’s ad campaign budget. But, they all have access to free social media. So, make your brand a bulls eye.

Social media can be an excellent tool for developing your brand and bringing in more customers, but only if you are aware of the value and work toward developing a solid social media campaign.

Tags: blogging, Facebook, foursquare, social, social media, twitter, value

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 at 9:38 am and is filed under social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.