faulker046

This is a one of those questions that keep coming up during conferences, the classes I teach at University of Washington, client conversations etc. The default answer by most of the people is along the lines of “Oh they don’t …. It is the quality…. What really matters is the impact on revenue/cost… “ and so on. I do not deny that ultimately the impact of business in terms of revenue/cost is what matters but saying that Likes/Followers don’t matter is flat out wrong.  It is equivalent to saying Visits to your site do not matter, potential customers in your store do not matter, subscribers of your email list do not matter etc. Likes/Followers are the foundation that is required to make your social media efforts successful. Without Likes you don’t have anybody to put your messages in front of.  Without them you have nobody to amplify your message and help attract others like them. If you are posting random stuff that has nothing to do with your business then you will attract...

Are you obsessing over the total number of mentions, number of positive mentions and negative mentions? If you are then you are not alone. This same issue came up recently while I was speaking on the subject of Social Media at a local event. One person got very concerned when I said that a lot of social media conversations are marked “Neutral” in most of the social media monitoring tools. The reason is that tools are not yet advanced enough to classify everything and so when in doubt the conversation is marked “Neutral” rather than “Positive” or “Negative” . So what do you do in this situation, when you know that the sentiment numbers are not right? Short answer is: Don’t obsess over the raw counts. Let’s face it; you will never get an exact count of mentions about your brand, products etc. let alone the sentiment counts. Here are few reasons why the number won’t be accurate Tools - The number of mentions will change with the tool you are using. Different tools have different sourc...

People talk, they say good things about a brand, they say bad things about a brand or they just talk. Social media has become a place for people to make sure whatever they are saying is heard loud and clear by their friend and followers on Facebook, twitter, blogs etc. Going through all this social media chatter to understand and figure out what is going on about your brand is a very labor and time intensive work. Even though many Social Media Monitoring tools have done a great job in aggregating the data from various sources, but to understand the context of those conversation and provide that to marketers in a meaningful way still needs a lot of work. Currently it really needs a human to understand the full context of the conversations and understand the sentiments of consumers. However there are some metrics that can provide you a measure of the sentiments (positive or negative) of these conversations and indicate which direction they are going. Social Media Sentiment M...

Adding a widget such as AddThis , ShareThis and Facebook Like button on your site makes it very easy for your site visitors to share your site and content with their friends and followers via email or social media. Even though these are small widgets, that your developers/designers might not have paid much attention to, they add a tremendous value to your business. According to a recent report by eMarketer 47.5% of the people trust the recommendations of their social media contacts. In order to leverage social sharers you have to make it easy for them to share you content and widgets like these do a good job in making your site shareable. A small widget like this can save you thousands of dollars in customer acquisition and even retaining the customers via either direct conversions from the traffic driven by shared links or by the brand awareness that those links create. Monetary value of Social Shares Most of the sharing widgets have built in analytics to measure the virality of your...

Several studies have shown that people trust the link and site recommendation they receive from their friends or experts in the field. To capitalize on this opportunity websites have long used features like “Recommend to a Friend” or “Email this” kind of functionality. Recently we have seen a rise in usage of tools/widgets that make it easy for the visitors to share links via email and social media. Measuring Virality Many of the tools/widget that allow you to add easy sharing now also have built in analytics to help you track things such as which content is getting shared, how many people like to share etc, what methods do they use to share etc. 3 tools that you should look into are: ShareThis AddThis Tynt Tool Comparison ShareThis and AddThis ShareThis and AddThis are very similar in functionality with some minor differences but they look more like each other. Both this widgets have very similar reporting and tell you How many links were shared How many people shared them What con...

I have few open positions in Web Analytics, Search Marketing (Organic and Paid) and Social Media Analytics. Job Requirements One of the following Web Analytics Tools Implementation : Omniture, WebTrends, Coremetrics, Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics etc.? Any one tool experience is good. Analysis : Do you have experience making sense of the data collected by the web analytics tool? It does not matter which tool. Optimization – Do you have experience with A/B , Muti-variate testing or targeting? Experience with Google Website Optimizer, Test&Target, Widemile, Optimost etc? Search Engine Optimization – Do you have experience doing search engine optimization? Are you passionate about it? Show me some examples? Show me your process. Paid Search – Have you run campaigns on Google Adwords? Bing or Yahoo? What has been the outcome? Social Media Analytics – Do you have experiencing analyzing and making recommendations based on social media conversation? Do you have experience usi...

One of my blog reader sent me the following question in response to my blog post, Social Media Analytics Part I Anil, are there any free tools for social media monitoring (twitter) that you can recommend? Tools, that a small business can use until they can justify the budget for one of the mainstream tools? Short answer is "Yes, there are free tools for Social Media Monitoring". Below are two of the tools that I suggest. 1. Google Alerts Google Alerts is one of the best free tool for monitoring the social media. Google Alert is an email alert service from Google that monitors news, blogs, twitter, sites, youtube etc. and sends you an email whenever a keyword, specified by you, appears in those places. You can access Google Alerts at http://www.google.com/alerts Google Alerts provides 6 types of alerts - 'News', 'Web', 'Blogs', 'Comprehensive', 'Video' and 'Groups'. According to Google Alerts FAQ A 'News' alert is an emai...

What is Social Media? There are so many ways people define social media and some even argue that it is not really media. According to Wikipedia , Social media is content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. Simply put, social media refers to all the conversation and engagement that happen on networks and sites like facbook, myspace, twitter, blogspehere, youtube, flicke, messageboard, forums etc.. Since these conversations can have a big impact on your brand it becomes critical for a marketer to understand what people are talking about their brand/products etc. so that they can take appropriate actions and help in creating and fostering a positive chatter (conversation) about their brand. Social Media analytics is about measuring and analyzing Social media (content generated by people throughout the web). Broadly, Social media measurements comes in two flavors Measuring the conversation about your brand in social media Measuring the impact you...