Your Social Media ROI

Southern Hospitality
Image by arvindgrover via Flickr

Does you business use social media and networking?  I suspect that you do or that you are considering it, or you probably wouldn’t be hanging around this blog.

A recent study of businesses who use social media found that, on average, each social media profile you support requires an investment of thirty-two hours each month.  That’s close to one standard work week for you or your employee.  If you are paying your social media person $20 per hour (a bargain basement price), that comes out to $640 per month for every social profile.

Let’s say that you’re just doing the basics in the social media world.  Maybe you have one Twitter profile, a presence on Facebook, network via LinkedIn and keep an updated set of Squidoo lenses; multiply that figure by four.  You’ll arrive at a figure of over $2500 per month.  For a mom and pop operation, that’s big money.  If you’re doing it yourself, that’s lots of time (128 hours).  Either way, “time is money.”

Do you receive enough value in return to at least cover those costs?  Unfortunately, the answer to that question is not always easy to determine.  It is fairly simple to track traffic that results from each of the platforms.  However, is that traffic of real value to you?  How can we determine that value?

For example, we know that the average time on site for traffic generated by a Twitter link is considerably lower than traffic that comes to the site through an organic search engine listing or a PPC ad.  That fact makes sense, because we know that the search engine is sending people who actually initiated the contact when they entered their search terms.

We also know that social media referrals are less likely to convert immediately into customers than are search engine referrals.  So, while we can track referral conversion, we’re likely to be disappointed in the results.  However, don’t rush to the conclusion that your social media investment is not providing a sufficient return on investment.

There are other factors that need to be considered.  I am going to consider just two of those other factors:  Repeated contacts and market awareness.

There is an old rule of thumb in Internet Marketing circles that a typical sale requires seven contacts prior to conversion.  In other words, the business must establish a relationship with the prospect to gain sufficient trust for that prospect to convert.  This is where social media shine: relationship building.  Trust builds over time and in subtle ways.  Using social media to demonstrate your professionalism, commitment to excellence and concern for not only the customer but also the prospect can help in this gradual conversion process.

Genuine participation in social media means more than sending your messages “out there.”  You need to also follow the pertinent conversations of others, as well.  Take advantage of the opportunity to learn what your competitors are doing.  Read what their customers are saying about them and what your customers are saying about you.  Determine what needs exist within your market, needs that you may be able to meet.  In other words, become an active “netizen.”  Trust comes more easily to community leaders.

Tracking and measuring all of this is not a simple process.  The eventual conversion may come to you from a source (medium) that is different from the one where you really won over the prospect.  For example, the customer might end up calling you or buying from your website after seeing your Facebook ad, but that even may have come after a period in which you developed the relationship by means of Squidoo or Twitter.  They might see your ad and think, “Oh yeah, I remember this company.”

Most of the kinds of research in which businesses engage is quantitative.  If we can’t assign it a number, we don’t care about it.  But there is another realm of research:  qualitative.

Qualitative research carefully examines not numeric data, such as we might find in blog comments, tweets and other verbal utterances.  Part of your time and/or financial investment in social media should be in gathering such verbal data and carefully analyzing it, mining it for its underlying meaning.  Only then will you begin to get a more accurate measure of the return on your social networking investment.

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Feature Of Tweetdeck

TweetDeck
Image via Wikipedia

by Veena

Tweet Deck is a free software program supported by Adobe Air that you can download and install on your desktop. Like other Twitter applications it interfaces with the Twitter API to allow users to send and receive tweets and view profiles. It is the most popular Twitter application with a 19% market share as of June 2009, following only the official Twitter.com website with 45.70% share for posting new status updates.

It allows you to load your Twitter information into it and group into smaller sections (or panes) for you to work with. After installation, you will have to fill in your Twitter user name and password so that the program can log in to your Twitter account. Every time you open Tweet Deck, it will automatically load your information from Twitter into your Tweet Deck. Once you are logged in and it is loaded, you can update your status, read other tweets and reply or retweet right there within Tweet Deck.

Default panes contain “All Tweets” – All the people that you are following, “Replies” – All @ messages sent to your username, and “Direct Messages” – All personal messages sent to your username. More panes can be added by using Tweetdeck’s features, such as Groups, and can be rearranged by moving them to the left or the right.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the great features of TweetDeck:

  • Breaks down your Tweets into small manageable bites/ categories.
  • You will never miss the @replies and you can keep a better track of all your conversations while still searching for keyword phrases, topics of interest or any other specific thing you want to keep updated on.
  • Keep TweetDeck minimized in your taskbar and a little window will pop up and notify you if you’ve received tweets.
  • There is no other app to beat TweetDeck for searching Twitter. You can set up a column to search any keywords or topics you like and TweetDeck keeps a running global search, powered my Summize, of your search terms. This is a must-have way to maximize the information and networking potential of Twitter.
  • keeps track of both the Direct Messages you send and the Direct Messages you receive seperately
  • Allows you to hover over the avatar of any tweet and reply, mark it as a favorite, DM or Retweet with the click of a button.
  • You can shorten your Tweets if you run over 140 characters, right from the TweetDeck panel.
  • It allows users to split the people they follow into groups, a very useful feature to many users. The client supports URL shortening which can be done on-the-fly.
  • TweetDeck can also translate tweets into thirty-five different language.
  • To save some typing effort, users can include a recent hashtag in their tweet simply by clicking on the Recent Hashtag button.

It is compatible with several operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. An iPhone version was released on the 19th June 2009. Originally, TweetDeck was aimed towards only Twitter but during 2009, the new versions were launched with integration of Facebook, Linkedin and MySpace and continue to be popular with an Alexa Rank of 4467 now.

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Seesmic Desktop Overview

by Veena

There’s a huge buzz today about Seesmic Desktop, an Adobe AIR-powered desktop application that is free to download and works with both PCs and Macs. Installation is a real breeze. Add and authorize your Twitter account and away you go. It also supports multiple Twitter accounts, a feature currently lacking in TweetDeck, another popular Twitter updater. Seesmic Desktop can be used for posting to Facebook and viewing status updates, you can also add comments, like items, view the comment and likes on individual wall posts, and even view photos in friends’ timelines. It’s really a fantastic way to engage with both Facebook and Twitter right from the same app.

Seesmic Desktop has Twitgoo, Posterous, and Pikchur for adding pictures to tweets. The new Seesmic Desktop is a dream application for the frequent status updater. One can add multiple Twitter accounts and unlimited columns to the Twitter-only desktop client. Seesmic Desktop comes with many amazing new features – the new URL shortener options — Digg’s new shortener is included — userlists (Seesmic Desktop’s name for groups), and the fact that duplicate tweets (across multiple Twitter accounts) are nonexistent. It also has the ability to snap images via webcam for posting to Twitpic. All of this activity is now conveniently residing within one window.

In the configuration settings you can do cool things like select how you want your re-tweets to be displayed: either as the standard RT, or by the full ‘retweet’, the ‘via’ method or ‘as said’ methods. Notifications that prompt you when you receive certain kinds of tweets can be received either with a sound or visual pop-up (or both, or neither).

The software defaults to a one-column display using the ‘home’ pane. This is your entire Twitter stream – everybody you follow. If you click on your username under ‘Accounts’ in the sidebar, the home pane gets some extra tabs: replies, direct messages, archives (messages sent by you) and a very handy ‘lookup’ feature, which lets you do a quick search on any Twitter account.

Seesmic also has a tie into Twitter and YouTube. So when you post a video on Seesmic, it can message out to Twitter and upload the video to YouTube automatically. This is a great way for Seesmic to drive traffic to itself.

All tweets also show both the user and real name of the tweeter. This is a nice touch, and makes everything that little bit more personable. Avatar’s are used in a similar way to TweetDeck – scroll your mouse over and four options will pop-up, allowing you to easily reply, re-tweet or direct message a user, with an extra button for additional functionality (like adding to groups).

So let’s look at some of the most noticed pros and cons of Seesmic Desktop:

Pros

  • Supports multiple Twitter accounts
  • Replies are mentioned
  • Shows the real name of the user within a tweet
  • Has a mute button
  • Closed panes aren’t deleted – they move to your sidebar
  • Has built-in support for Twitpic and a webcam function
  • Uses only about half of the memory that TweetDeck needs

Cons

  • Seems to crash fairly regularly and when it does you lose all front-end configuration
  • Groups require manual additions and can be a bit awkward
  • Doesn’t display which tweet another user has replied to, so tracing conversations is awkward
  • Doesn’t track API usage, but limits you to 80 calls/hour
  • No warning when deleting a tweet

Overall, the seismic Desktop has earned its place in the hearts of all who are crazy about tweeting or updating facebook regularly. With each new version, Seesmic Desktop is getting better and better.

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