Social Media ROI ~ create a strategy, tip #1

Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook and/or LinkedIn follow these five tips to help you measure your social networking return on investment (ROI) efforts:
1. Create a strategy
2. Use automation
3. Use cross platform tools
4. Invest in training
5. Track and measure
You can find an overview of all five tips in the original article “Social Media ROI“. This article is part 2 of the 6 part series which will focus on ROI tip #1 ~ Create A Strategy.
When creating your high-impact social media strategy you should do the following:
• set goals that turn your followers, fan and connections into buyers
It does not matter if you have 1, 100, 1000, 10,000 or 1,000,000 Twitter followers, Facebook fans or LinkedIn connections if none of them are listening or purchasing your products and services.
• identify offline and online ways to get found by your ideal prospects
Offline – Because of budget constraints it’s easy to neglect updating your promotional materials to include your Twitter handle, Facebook fan page url or your public LinkedIn profile url. You can accomplish these for free (or very low cost) using a company like Vista Print.
Online – You can easily add your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn information to the signature line of your email. Or you can copy their provided code to add your Twitter stream to your Facebook page or LinkedIn’s Company Buzz application to add Twitter.
• save time by repurposing content
Reuse content from your website, blog and marketing materials to post on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. You can break up your about us section into small pieces of information, visit industry specific websites with good information or create daily or weekly tips or tricks to post on all social networking sites.
• understand how often to tweet, post, and update
It’s about time… How many times does it take a person to see your marketing or advertising message before they buy? Keep in mind the Rule of Seven which states a prospect needs to see or hear your marketing message at least seven times before they take action and buy from you.
• acknowledge remarkable results then repeat the process
If you are driving traffic to a blog or web page make sure you are measuring the results. Google analytics is a great free tool however the statistics are from the previous day. If you need real-time web stats check out Clicky or try bit.ly to measure clicks on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn too!
Before you get started, be sure to add these to your overall marketing plan. Since each social network site is different you need to decide in advance what and how you are going to promote your product or service on each. Make sure you understand the rules on each site because it’s not hard to find someone trying to use Facebook like Twitter or LinkedIn like Twitter though they are totally different tools with clearly defined rules and criteria for providing information to your list.
image courtesy of TheDesignSuperhero.com
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Your Twitter post has some valid points and I am glad I found it! I believe that social media is going to be the future home for any and all advertising and marketing. With Google’s real-time search and other search engines catching on quickly you will see many SEO Companies becoming Twitter SEO Companies very soon! I wrote a post that you may be interested to read about Twitter SEO
I am an avid Twitter user and focus on building the value that I add to the rest of my social network, I help to promote any and everyone that asks me for help (as long as they are not loco in la cabessa!). I believe that optimizing your profiles is very important, just as optimizing your website is, but the most important part of any SEO efforts is having quality content. The same goes for Twitter, you need quality content and updates for people to read and link to. If you tweet about the right subjects you will notice more and more incoming links to your twitter profile when your tweets start being republished on other people’s blogs (provides some temporary page rank). Also you can do your own personal “Social Media Press Release” and some good old fashioned article directory link building with your Twitter profile.
Social media is the first step to an “open-source” media and news. My twitter username is @gohewitt for anyone looking to follow. I am excited to see what comes of all of this and feel that we still don’t have a clue what being “Connected” really means just yet!
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