Pittsburgh Social Media Marketing Campaign Strategies

The first 3 posts in this series:

• Planning Your Social Media Campaign
• Analyzing Your Social Media Campaign
• Implementing Your Social Media Campaign

have showed how to plan your social media campaign, analyze the social media market, and implement a social media campaign. Now it’s time to look at measurement of your efforts to determine your campaigns effects on Traffic, SEO, and Reach.

Measurement statistics or analytics, as they are referred to, provide a way to judge how effective your campaigns are to date. Analytics can provide valuable insight into strengths and weaknesses of your social media campaigns and sniff out opportunities that you may have to promote your campaigns and your business.

THE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING MIX – ANALYTICS

All websites and blogs should have some form of Analytics. The screenshot above is from a Twitter analytics tool called Twitalyzer. Measuring your success in the Social Media arena is very important. There are many great social media platforms to choose from; as mentioned in the previous posts in this series. Measuring your traffic on your website or blog can be done with a simple hit counter. Other more involved statistics can be done by implementing Google Analytics or AWstats.

Here is a great article to show you how involved statistics can be and how much they can cost. (see comments) Having said that there are loads of free tools that you can utilize to measure your social success in the marketing arena for free.

A great free tool for you to benchmark where you are at any time is http://www.socialmention.com/. This is very powerful and provides you with a number of options for finding your content and reach. Of course if you are yet to start your campaign then it can give you an idea of how competitive the social media landscape has become for your terms.

Another free tool we really like is http://www.howsociable.com . This tool generates scores based on your level of involvement in dozens of social media sites. It is no frills, no login, and generates a nice idea of how well your campaign is progressing.

Just remember that analytics are only a barometer of how well your doing. The true measure of your success is always conversions. Need help with your Pittsburgh Social Media Marketing campaigns? Contact Blackball Online Marketing for a free analysis.

Pittsburgh Social Media Marketing Campaign Strategies

Okay, you have a website that's been well designed and SEO’d for your keywords. Other On Page SEO has been implemented and your site is Indexed in Google and the other major search engines. Your content has been optimized as well as validated. Your backlinking strategy is in place and continuously being improved. What about Social Media?

There are hundreds or thousands of social media websites out there. Which ones should you choose? Facebook? Linked in? Twitter? MySpace? YouTube? Yahoo Buzz? Google Buzz? Mixx? Reddit? Digg? Sphinn? Technorati? BlogCatalog? Stumble upon? Scribd? Twaango? De.li.cio.us? Squidoo? Leapfish? Orkut? I think you start to see the problem.

The Social Media Jungle

THE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING MIX - PLANNING

Do you have a PR department? Most small businesses say no. But we say, yes you do. Your Public Relations department is every owner, partner, employee, customer, supplier, and person who knows about your business. That’s the beauty of Social Media.

Your Social Media Marketing mix is the combination of the Social Media sites that you use and the frequency in which you use them. Any good campaign starts with a plan, this is no different for Social Media Marketing or SMM. Looking deeper into Social Media as a strategy is Social Media Optimization or SMO. Before we analyze any sites we must first look at the resources at hand that can be leveraged for your campaign. Once you have a firm grasp of the time and talent you're willing to dedicate then you're ready to move on to analyzing your audience.

When giving a speech, the first rule is to know your audience. This is key in social media as well. What forms of social media does your audience use? Running a Twitter campaign when your target market is all on Facebook won’t help nearly as much. Are there trade specific forums available? This is information you should already have. If you don't, just look at the main keywords you use for your advertising. Your customers themselves can be a valuable tool as well. Just ask them.

Marketing and Advertising on the Internet through Social Media is still based on sound fundamental principles. Good customer service, responsiveness, and a clear and consistent message should be the main themes of any marketing or advertising campaign. Just remember, unrealistic expectations ruin marketing campaigns. Be prepared to invest plenty of time and energies and you will reap the rewards.

Blackball Online Marketing specializes in social media campaigns for small businesses in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. We also provide social media consulting to help you get started or to take your use of Social Media to the next level.