Social media marketing is everywhere. From pop stars to reality TV stars, from big brand names to small businesses, from internet marketers to MLM, you cannot be taken seriously unless you have a social network presence. It seems the more fans and followers you accumulate, the more popular you supposedly are.

Is anyone making money?

It is far from clear whether there is real value of social networking in terms of return on investment. How does this online media frenzy benefit your business or does it just burn a hole in your time freedom, outsourcing or advertising budget?

Research from eMarketer* indicates that almost half of brands are unconvinced that social marketing’s offers real value as a advertising investment, be it time or money, and has shown the lack of clear measurements of impact and ROI from social media marketing are the reason most social efforts remain low.

What is striking is the conclusion that “While relatively few marketers reported social was pointless and overhyped or too complicated to deal with, most are still not increasing revenues or otherwise profiting from their social efforts.”

In fact of the half that had some kind of social media marketing campaign going, only about a third felt it was making them money!

What can you measure?

In an attempt to crack the complexity, Cisco have developed a social media measurement framework as a guide and resource for their internal teams to help determine what and how to measure for their social media programs and initiatives.

The measurement “streams” group the most common goals and ties them back to potential key performance indicators and metrics to track them. Hard ROI type quantitative impact measures are certainly difficult to pin down for social media marketing. The environment is completely different to the straightforward cause and effect of most pay-per-click advertising strategies.

With social media marketing, you have to track what is happening in the wider sense first, and extrapolate, thus assessing some of the softer benefits than can have a financial impact further down the line.

6 ways to assess ROI

Here are six ways you can start to assess whether social media marketing is working and your business is actually making money online:

1. Have a clear strategy for your social media marketing. Decide if it is for brand awareness, reputation building, networking, lead generation. Set targets for number of followers or fans, number of leads and assess against daily, weekly, monthly activity over time.

2. Add tracking codes to every aspect of your social media marketing so that you can attribute lead generation to different parts of your strategy specifically and follow them through your sales funnel.

3. Analyse your costs per lead, cost per conversion, cost against earnings etc. For each tracked aspect of your social media marketing campaigns, such as tweets, Facebook posts or social network PPC, videos etc. right down to the specific ad copy for any given posting or page.

4. Analyse your demographics, by using your own tracking, Facebook reporting, or different twitter profiles, or with Google Analytics. Again, track through your entire sales funnel, from impressions to clicks to leads to front end sales to back end commissions to see if there are patterns of people (gender, location, interests etc) who convert highest and are thus most targeted ‘hot’ prospects to focus on going forward.

5. Incorporate feedback activities into your marketing, such as questionnaires (e.g. Survey Monkey) based on open, focus group type questions that ask specifically how people found you, what they like/don’t like about what you do/provide.

6. You should follow up on the ways people enter your social media marketing networks and build out your marketing from there. For instance, you can use tools in Alexa to see where people come from when they visit your site and where they go next!

These are the very basics metrics you should be reviewing. At its very best, social media marketing can be an effective way of attracting highly targeted prospects into your sales funnel.

However, the path to securing a real return on costs in terms of time and paid advertising has far more to do with building trust than selling technique. Social networks are not the place for blatant sales pitches, in fact businesses and individuals show their ignorance and lack of professionalism with that approach.

Rather, social media marketing has everything to do with the development of authentic relationships and giving good value and service to others, a strategy which fosters social proof, long term customers and loyalty.

Social media marketing is one of the top priorities for businesses with an online presence in 2009, new research indicates. 

A major benefit to this type of marketing is it costs nothing to join and this in comparison to other traditional and sometimes costly marketing techniques that can leave you paying out far more than you ever get in.  What you are basically doing with social marketing is building on the back of your own network of contacts and clients and using that network to build your campaign.

The main social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube etc) are all free and are surprisingly simple to manage and maintain.  Alongside these sits blogging and article writing.  Things you can do with these networking opportunities include:

• Publicity – social media allows people to share things of interest with everyone thus increasing the visibility of your business and yourself
• Support – joining like minded groups will allow you to share areas of common interest, assisting and helping others whilst seeking support in areas you feel a bit of guidance is needed.
• Integrate – add social media into your other marketing arenas

Manage

Simplicity is the key and all of these sites can be surprisingly simple to manage and maintain. The truly great thing about social media is that it allows you to enter the fray with as large or as small a commitment as you feel is appropriate to you.

Another great thing about social media is that it has the potential to offer your business a whole new world of opportunities that are affordable, measurable and on an international scale.

What not to do

• Don’t just go on there to actively promote your business, people will rapidly lose interest in you as to them you ‘have little or no value’.
• Never leave a derogatory or negative comment in response to someone, if you don’t agree or dislike what someone may have said, sometimes it’s best just to ignore.

What to do

•  Inject an element of fun, fear or controversy into your campaigns
•  Offer something unique that you either know or suspect people will find interesting
•  If you’re aiming at a younger audience, find out where your audience is and target them on their terms and in their language
• Aim to build an audience each and every time you start a new campaign.  With social media you can hang onto some of those people and build up your own community, one that ideally intersects around the world.

The key to maintaining and building that community is a blog for your business, and here are some of the benefits:

• Higher search engine rankings – generally speaking, a regular stream of new articles is considered appealing by the search engines, who will pay more attention to your blog or website, ranking you more highly accordingly. The more pages you write, the more there is to be found. However, it’s an exercise in quality not quantity!
• Gaining trust – by writing informative and authoritative articles, over time you’ll build confidence, trust, respect and a sense of “expert status” around your business.
• A sense of community – you’re engaging with your customers in a conversational style that’s difficult to replicate by other means. And by allowing people to comment on your articles, you’re encouraging those people to participate, giving them a reason to return. In simple terms, a blog is a great opportunity for you to quickly share ideas

In Summary

Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels and it is a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic.  Social media marketing is an excellent way to get people to come into your site to take a look at at what you have to offer.  The actual overall process of this area of marketing is not difficult at all. 

It is one of the most effective tools for boosting your online business and making a presence for it in the web world. 

Social media marketing is one of the newest methods of marketing a web site and has evolved quickly into one of the most effective methods.

One of the biggest pitfalls affiliate marketers face is losing sight of the big picture.

You might think you are focusing your campaign on driving the market to conversion. If you aren’t converting your traffic and it is arriving in good numbers, obviously something is wrong. There are four mistakes that are very common for affiliates to make. Anyone of them will definitely cause your affiliate niche marketing program to not pay off as it should have.

Mistake #1: Sometimes you get so involved in all the separate pieces of your campaign that you can forget the purpose behind your efforts. What is the reason you are building and launching a promotion? Everything you do must support the product or service you are marketing. If you loose focus of your purpose you won’t be able to take full advantage of any affiliate niche marketing program.

Mistake #2: No matter what types of feeder pages you create they all have to support your efforts. You can’t build blogs, do article marketing or social marketing or whatever form of feeder pages you come up with and forget or overlook that the only reason you are doing this is to support and build the main money site. You could have the highest paying affiliate niche marketing program in the world and not make a dime because you aren’t sticking to your purpose.

Mistake #3: No matter how much traffic you build, if you aren’t offering your target audience something of value you have lost them.

Mistake #4: Don’t expect them to know what you want them to do when the target arrives on your page. You have to tell them what you want them to do. Affiliate niche marketing program success can only happen when you direct the actions of the traffic you have driven to your page.

Mistake #5: A lot of even talented affiliate marketers can easily fall into a lack of clarity. If it isn’t clear what the page is about when the target arrives, they’ll be gone in an instant. Focus on the action you want them to take. Don’t clutter up the page. Too many images and graphics mean they have to think about what is going on. They don’t want to think, they want to know what to do here.

Affiliate niche marketing programs will only pay off when you are in control of the visitor.

You can’t have poorly written copy or miss out on the opportunity to use a call to action. You need to make the most out of your keywords and push the traffic to convert. That is how you make money in affiliate marketing. If you did all the research, then one of these common mistakes might be what has closed you off from a revenue stream.