April 27th, 2010 by Nick

Social media marketing requires a lot of dedication and patience. Creating suitable profiles and blogs, not to mention regular tweets or status updates which are both interesting and relevant to people is not always easy. It requires a lot of skill and can take time to get right, so not expecting the earth straight away is essential.

So what are the best ways to measure your SMM strategies? You can monitor yourself by seeing how many people have viewed your blogs, or by tracking comments or responses on your networking or blog sites, but is this really a productive use of your time? After all, time spent reviewing the activity of others could be time spent tweeting.

There are some well known and trusted websites which will monitor the activity surrounding your social activity. Socialmention is a site which offers quite basic details on your company or industry as a whole, but is very effective. Socialmention also allows you to search by different category such as just within blogs or news feeds, making it easier to assess certain elements of your social media optimization strategies or your overall marketing campaign as a whole. There are other sites such as backtype and howsocial which give you details of rankings if it is just standard data you are after. Whilst all these are great for basic tracking of your social marketing activity, but if you want more then you can have more.

If you want detailed reporting on not only your social activity but more insight into your audience trends then there are some fantastic websites available which offer a vast array of tools to monitor this activity. These types of websites take social media marketing to an entire new level, and turn light hearted tweeting into a whole new ball game.

There are several sites around which offer more indepth information into your social marketing effectiveness – especially how it relates to search engine optimization, and one company being praised quite frequently is Radian6. Radian6 comes at a price, but the detail of the results it offers are worth it. A service such as this should only be used if SMM features highly on your marketing effectiveness and is an integral part of your company, and it will open up a whole new world of opportunity in your online social world.

There are so many services which Radian6 offers, but some of the key points that really make it stand out are its ability to segment your markets under various criteria such as media format and location. It also recognises influencing links and votes online and can even enable you to link to specific members of your team or one specific strategy so you can monitor each element separately. The list goes on and on, and if that wasn’t enough, the reports are all done for you in an easy to understand manner.

Whether you monitor your SMO yourself or choose to get help, the fact that all these facilities exists only highlights the success of the social networking world in terms of driving traffic online.

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