Have you noticed that social media is helping a number of businesses worldwide in reaping rich benefits?

If you are aspiring to make it big in the ‘digitally ahead’ corporate environment, you have to ensure that your social media activities are moving in the right direction. Sometimes, you may get to hear that a successful social entity has a huge number of fans and followers in Facebook and Twitter respectively. But, you need to understand that these metrics aren’t the best indicators of engagement with your potential customers. When you employ various social media tools for enhancing the web presence of your business, you also need to use different social media monitoring tools to measure the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts.

Wondering how this can be done? Well, here is an interesting description about 4 key metrics that should always be a part of your social media management strategy:

• Gross Views – Basically, it is the aggregate of all the views across your various social media channels. This is an effective tool that actually reflects the number of times Internet users were exposed to your brand through your online marketing channels. Some of the common metrics that go into this particular calculation are Facebook page views, Blog page views, Flickr photo views, and YouTube channel views.

• Audience Engagements – This is actually a direct measure of how actively your social media audience is engaging with your brand (or company). It ranges from Blog comments and Twitter retweets to Facebook interactions and various Social media brand mentions.
• Social Media Referrals – Since the primary objective of your online marketing campaign is driving the visitors to a specific site where conversions can take place – measuring and analyzing your social media referrals becomes an integral part of your SMM strategy.
• Connections – Finally, you have to calculate the exact number of visitors who have expressed an interest in your brand. This is extremely crucial as it helps you determine whether your digital marketing efforts are useful, or whether you have to consider modifications in your social media strategy.

Apart from these key metrics, you can also include some additional performance monitoring tools and ensure that you are in a great position to establish a robust social media image!

Some might argue that the title is exaggerated. This is mainly due to the misconception that most people have – ‘social media is used just to keep in touch with friends or meet new friends from all across the world’!

But, did you know that social media is being used by diplomats and senators also?

Recently, the US diplomats have discovered that social media helps them to become more influential. And why not? After all, online presence certainly counts when you need to reach out to your fellow countrymen. It is almost like they get a new voice via the digital world. That is why the US State Department is using social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter during any crisis. They try to prevent the damage caused with some of the top secret documents getting leaked. But, you also need to know that they mostly use social media so that the traditional media can’t act as middlemen during a particular crisis. Social networking sites have helped these clever diplomats to develop a unique defense mechanism against the traditional media factors. And, it’s mentionworthy that these efforts are also helping them in concentrating their followers, mainly during electoral campaigns.

The diplomats are not using the Internet for the first time, but they are using social media to communicate with people in a better way during various political crisis. Recently, State Department spokesman PJ Crowley tweeted extensively to explain the stand taken by the US Government, to disprove rumors and handle the situation in Haiti much peacefully before the former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier arrived. This is just one instance out of the many that’s taking place not only in the US, but also in other countries around the world. In India (a land which was supposedly very particular when it came to media and its various factors), the former External Affairs minister – Shashi Tharoor is pretty obsessed with social media and is an active user of the social networking site Twitter.

Thus, you can see how widespread and powerful social media has become with diplomats, politicians, and bureaucrats stepping in!

Yes social media is huge and it can’t just be relegated to being a medium of marketing for small businesses only! Previously, social media was looked upon as a last resort to promote a product or service. Plus, it was only for small businesses who could not afford to spend lavish amounts of money on advertising campaigns.

Not anymore! Some of the leading brands of today are using social media to promote their products and are striking gold here:

• Inception – Although it is a movie, it can’t be termed less than a brand now due to its spectacular success. News coverage of the film and feedback from fans were constantly popping up on the Facebook page of Inception that had a record 500,000 in the initial stage.
• Old Spice – It released a video featuring actor Isaiah Mustafa who made waves on YouTube and Twitter. People wanted to get in touch with him and the company answered questions by uploading short videos on YouTube. Celebrities too began tweeting about the campaign and sales went up by 106%.
• Red Bull – This well-known energy drink had about 8 million fans at the beginning which went up to 14 million at the end of 2010. The social games tab called Procrastination Station is the USP with games such as the Red Bull soapbox race.
• Ford – Yes, Ford also used social media (Facebook) to promote their 2011 Ford Explorer. There was an online auto show directed 104% of traffic to the Explorer pages and the number of SUV buyers went up by 52%.

Therefore, it is evident that social media is now being used in almost all the sectors to promote products or services. Social media marketing techniques can effectively enhance the web presence of your business and help you in climbing the ladder of success. So, don’t hesitate and join the race or you will be left behind!

When you consider using social media strategies for business purposes, it goes without saying that you are looking to enhance your commercial performance and maximize profits. Under such circumstances, it’s more than important that you know the ways of creating a useful social media profile. Now if you begin to think – “how come so much importance is being heaped on an individual’s social media profile?” The answer would be – “it is the online profile of an individual that really creates an image about the person or his business”.

A good online profile will help you in creating a brand that will help you in marketing your business in an effective manner. If you are a newcomer in social media, you may require some assistance when creating a good social media profile. However, corporate marketing experts firmly vouch that it would be wise if a business undertaking could use the services of online marketing agencies and formulate an entire digital marketing strategy besides creating the right online profile.

These 3 steps can help you in creating an effective and organic social media profile:

• First of all, make sure that you are easy to find online. Create a social media business profile with a suitable name which can easily relate to the services/products that you offer. This serves as a good starting point as you may not be able to make changes to this afterwards.
• Secondly, when you are looking to create a social media profile for your business, always make sure that you use a good and professional-looking picture for the various profiles that you establish. Also remember to include a link to your business website and relevant contact details in your profile. This will help in building up your brand besides marketing your business online.
• And finally, always remember that consistency is the key to commercial success. Remember to go back in and update your profile if anything changes (especially if you move or change business direction).

Now you must have realized that creating and maintaining a social media profile for your business is not as difficult as it may seem. Social media marketing tactics can always boost your business and help you in climbing the ladder of success pretty fast!

If you sit in front of your PC and start using the Internet to review social media’s performance in the last year – it won’t be long before you get amazed by the figures that pop-up!

Oh! 2010 was a year when the world went crazy about social media, the other services that are provided through various social networking portals and, of course, who can forget Facebook?

From the tender-hearted 7-year old kid to the 65-year old grandpa, everyone’s pretty obsessed with Facebook (FB). If you want figures, here are they – there are over 500 million active users on FB, while an average user has 130 friends approximately. And that’s not all – people worldwide are reportedly spending 700 billion minutes per month on FB, when there are 900 million objects on FB (such as pages, groups, events, and such other applications) that people interact with. And, such wondrous statistics have made Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO and co-founder, the Time Person of the Year 2010.

2011 is expected to be an equally good year for social media. Here are some predictions put forth by some of the leading social media marketing experts of the present day:

• Social media applications and tools will start emerging as the “social currency” that will be extensively used by (almost) everyone to build personal relationships, enhance business performance, and reach out to a greater number of people for corporate needs.
• Now, you would certainly agree to the fact that social is much bigger when compared to marketing and PR – it actually becomes a customer phenomenon. 2011 is most likely to witness a gradual shift from the traditional marketing and targeting techniques to social media marketing and customer interaction procedures.
• Social media will also become increasingly mobile, as more people start showcasing their weakness towards smartphones (3G and 4G phones). Social media will also increase the social networking activities such as video and photograph sharing. And, quite automatically this will have dramatic implications for content marketing and digital marketers.

Above all, an agenda which can be primarily vouched is – the increased use of social media tools will definitely see marketers and brands thinking like publishers and broadcasters owing to the larger web presence that they get to enjoy. So, are you still waiting to judge the credibility of social media?