Since I've been working on a social media strategy recently (I'll post more details soon), I thought I'd share some tools which I think could be useful to anybody managing their own SMO.
The first one is a social boomarking tool called Social Marker (http://www.socialmarker.com/). While some people may not think of social bookmarks sites as part of a social media strategy, they are a great way to syndicate your content using your own tags, especially when combined with buttons on your site.
The best feature of Social Marker is that it allows you to bookmark your content on all of the main social bookmarks sites at the click of a button (including delicious, reddit, digg, stumble upon...). Initial set up may take a while as you need to register individually on each of the sites, but once this is done, everything will be very straightforward.
When used with free social buttons (www.addthis.com), your social bookmarking efforts will never be the same again!
The next tool is a video upload service that allows you to upload your rich media on a wide range of video sites at the click of a button. The principle is the same as social marker with a slightly long initial setup (need to register on sites such as youtube, dailymotion...) and simplicity afterwards. Tube Mogul (http://www.tubemogul.com/) also gives you in depth analysis for each of your videos, allowing you to understand users behaviour across the sites.
Because social media can be extremely time consuming, it is becoming essential for any internet marketeer to automate a lot of the tasks. This can be a simple link between a blog/rss feed and twitter (http://twitterfeed.com/) but it can also mean developing apps that will automatically distribute new content from a website to sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogs, Twitter....I'm sure a few tools are readily available online, but bespoke solutions can be ideal if you have the web development resources.
Ok, so now you have the right tools to start implementing your strategy, but how do you measure it? While it is hard to find any free integrated social media effectiveness reporting tools, a few tips can help you measure basics fairly easily.
If you use google analytics, you can create a new segment to compare social media results with other marketing channels (paid, organic..) Instructions here. Being a bit of a Google Analytics fan myself, I can only highly recommend Brian Clifton's blog, Measuring Success.
Ploked.com also gives some really good info on which metrics you should use when measuring social media activities.
While I'm sure most of you enjoy spending time using social media, I think it is very important for any business to make the most out of this wonderful internet marketing channel by planning its growth and carefully measuring results.
Enjoy your weekend!
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