GOSO

By: Chris Garrett Co-Author of Best Seller of ProBlogger, our celebrity blogger, Chris has helped thousands of individuals, non-profits, small businesses and blue chips make the most of the web.

Many businesses are concerned about the return on investment from social media, in particular justifying the time investment with these tools.

Fact is though, online is far more accountable than many of the offline strategies that you are already using. This is because the “currency” of social media is the link. Not much happens without someone clicking something, and any time a link is clicked there is an opportunity to track that.

What does a click tell you?

• Where the link was seen (“Referrer”)
• What the person was interested in (“attractiveness”)
• How many people were interested in that link (“popularity”)
• How many more people were interested in that over an alternative version (“split testing”)
• If the link was shared, and if so how many times (“viral effect”)

Depending on your tools you should be able to take the path the visitor arrived via and record that. Later you can see which source of visitors is worth the most and which either need to be optimized or dropped. The free and extremely powerful Google Analytics is a good start. Check out how I track my Twitter audience with Google’s software here.

What if you do not have sophisticated tracking in place? Simply use unique links for each venue.

• Using a service such as Bit.ly you can share your content in social networks, on forums and in your own sites, and it will count how many times a link has been clicked and how many times it was shared.
• Many companies provide each service audience with unique offers – if those offers are taken up, maybe by using a unique voucher code etc, you know where the person heard about your deal.
• Have unique 800 numbers for each venue, so that if you get a telephone call you know the source of that sales lead.
• Failing all the above … ask!

There really is no need for your efforts to be all based on guess work, you just need to put some effort into working out what is working well and what is not working, then optimize or prioritize appropriately!