Improving Your Social Marketing Presence
The goal of this initiative is not to find massive traffic, it’s to find relevant users and increase my content distribution. It is one thing to gauge your monthly visitors, but how active are you in resolving issues or continuing success in your online marketing campaign?
I was very pleased to see monthly stats rise, greater discussions and new social networks flourishing adding to my visibility. I got too comfortable in 2009 with just raw numbers, that my data analysis was lacking. You don’t have to be a scholar to make improvements: just show you care and improve.
Social Networking/Social Bookmarking/Search Engine
The title of this section describes the 3 facets of my marketing plan that I constantly try to improve. The stats below are provided by my favorite WordPress plugin, Referrer Detector. This plugin allows me to see where my social and search engine traffic is coming from.
Referrer Detector is a WordPress plugin that shows a greeting to users coming from various areas of the internet. For example, If someone found one of my articles on Digg and they click through to my site, the user finds a personalized message to vote up that article or become a friend on Digg.
Another example I see is if a user comes from finding me in search results in Google, I can customize the message to say “don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS”. Very helpful and provides a call to action to promote your efforts more.
The stats breakdown is very nice. I like to see the pie chart that comes out to gauge where all my efforts are going to. Break down the stats: daily/monthly/yearly/all time/ or specified dates.
Plan
I want to increase production and mainly my effectiveness. I feel like a fool because I was so focused on search engine marketing and the stats show it. I’m believing that the balance has to exist because social media networks are vital. Here are some stats for Hip Hop Distribution that I found interesting over this selected time period.
I’ve always felt strong about my search engine traffic. I’ve worked really hard doing research, and optimizing all my content, but even though the graph shows nice Google traffic, my Yahoo presence sucks. Analysis shows my efforts can still improve. Even a successful segment can be improved upon.
Stumbleupon and Digg provided nice referrals. Twitter showed improvement over last month and out did my Yahoo search engine referrals. How can I fix it?
Why not try using Yahoo Buzz to social bookmark some content and maybe it could gain a little momentum within that search engine. Will it work? Maybe. The proof lies in my test. Be creative with solutions, it’s always worth a shot if you are trying to improve your business.
Build your own stats and fix accordingly. The main thing here is what proof do YOU have that your social media campaign is effective or lacking?
Homework
The stats can be taken from your control panel if you are not using this plugin. Ask yourself these questions:
- How many Social Bookmarking/Social Networking sites are you using?
- Where is your content flourishing?
- Where are you going to improve?
Don’t sit back and let your stats plateau, keep them rising. Analyze and think of ways to introduce your content into different channels. I am currently breaking down each social network and implementing some tasks to create engaging conversations, adding more followers, and spending time where it is most promising. The one troublesome fact of this analysis for me is my Facebook presence needs severe improvement. Live, Test and Learn.
Set a timetable where you want to monitor your activity. Blind promotion is over with in 2010. Stay active, your content distribution relies on it.
Feel free to Tweet and Stumble this article if you enjoy it.
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January 17th, 2010 at 10:01 pm
Very useful information Mario, thanks for sharing. I like the use of the Referrer Detector. I’ve been using WP Greet Box, but it doesn’t provide the stats that Referrer Detector does. I too, like to know where my traffic is coming from and how I can maximize my efforts to improve and find an efficient balance. Good stuff my friend!
January 17th, 2010 at 5:01 pm
Very useful information Mario, thanks for sharing. I like the use of the Referrer Detector. I've been using WP Greet Box, but it doesn't provide the stats that Referrer Detector does. I too, like to know where my traffic is coming from and how I can maximize my efforts to improve and find an efficient balance. Good stuff my friend!
January 17th, 2010 at 11:36 pm
Thanks Sean. I ran across Referrer Detector by chance and love it. It brought up a serious observation for me. Search engine results are great but once I saw live Twitter results showing up in Google searches, bumping down content, I needed to address balance and at least improve certain segments. Just trying different things, but glad it was useful.
January 17th, 2010 at 6:36 pm
Thanks Sean. I ran across Referrer Detector by chance and love it. It brought up a serious observation for me. Search engine results are great but once I saw live Twitter results showing up in Google searches, bumping down content, I needed to address balance and at least improve certain segments. Just trying different things, but glad it was useful.