Social Media, SEO, Tweet, Digg? Help!

Definition of Irony: To become a social media expert you have to eschew socializing to spend time alone with your computer.

Do you ever feel that all this is just too much to learn? If you do, you’re probably not alone. It takes a person who is not all that social to have the time to become a social media expert.

What can you do?

If you’re running your own business, your day is full of things to do, people to see, phone calls to make. Add blogging and twittering to that? How can you? Well, everything you do during the day has to primary goal of getting clients, successfully meeting their needs and making a profit. If social media paid off in actual clients, would you do it?

ROI on Social Media

Dabbling in social media won’t cut it. You don’t have to totally understand how it works but you do have to be prepared to put in time and energy learning how to write good posts and tweets. Advertising and actual SEO grunt work, after a suitable amount of discussion, can be left to staff or consultants. Blogging however, needs to be personal, knowledgeable and interactive.

So, can we measure ROI on Social Media? Let me answer a question with a question; it depends. It depends on what you want to do. Do you want to watch what is being said about you in social media and find a way to respond? Do you want to research what people are saying about you? Do you want to know what they’re saying about your competitors?

Alternatively, you might want to try and build better customer relations. You want to quickly respond to issues that customers are having so you keep them loyal. So you actually want a dialogue with customers?

Measurement

Like PR, some activities are not so easy to measure. If your goal is to build traffic to your website, that is pretty easy to measure. You can get a free account with Google Analytics and watch exactly what happens on your site: where people come from, when they come, if the search engines are finding you and so on. Your web manager or SEO specialist can help you with this. But first you have to have your goal in mind.

Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN

Aston Kutcher is now the most followed person on Twitter. He entered into a competition with CNN to see who could get over a million followers first. He won and donated $100,000 to a charity helping to prevent malaria. We are not all Ashton Kutcher and probably won’t every have over a million followers on Twitter or anywhere else. However, we can slowly build a following of colleagues and clients via social media. Think what you could do with that kind of voice. It takes time and commitment, just like any worthwhile endeavor. I always say this, but I’ll say it again; it’s up to you to decide if you are willing to make the commitment.