Measuring Your Social Media Success

 It is true that people may or may not talk about the your products, no matter how satisfied they are with it. That is why even if we live in a world of computers and cyber marketing, it is indeed difficult to measure profits rendered via the Internet. At the end of the day, a company’s success can only be measured by the sales it gains, although one cannot discount the effect of social media in the lives of people. If one will base the success of an online marketing strategy through a company’s likes on Facebook and retweets on Twitter, we should probably divert the attention now as to how can a company make its customers speak about them.

At this day and age, children young as those in kindergarten are already thought how to use the computer. Kids at around nine or ten already have their own Facebook or Twitter account. Times spent for social interactions such as going over a friend’s house to play doll or trade cards have extremely lessened over the past years. This is due to the advent of social media providing cheaper methods to reach other people. Nowadays, mommy no longer has to go to the store to buy clothes. Papa doesn’t have to go to the bank to pay the bills. Children don’t have to spend hours on finding certain books in the library and haggle with the stern look of the school librarian. Instead, people can now order goods via the Internet and have it shipped door-to-door, pay the bills online, and research in the e-libraries schools provide. In effect, business owners divert most of their campaign funds to online marketing. But even though more and more people depend on the Internet, how can companies measure the success of this marketing strategy? Before we go on discussing the ways to measure businesses’ online marketing success, let us first differentiate Sales and Marketing. Marketing is the laying ground and discussing how to reach out to your buyers, whereas Sales is the conversion of these strategies to profit. Therefore, there may not be sales in marketing, but there is always marketing in sales. And the basic way to measure a strategies’ success is if it yields sales or revenue. This article will tackle how to measure the success of marketing strategies done through the Internet.

One basic thing about marketing your product or services is to let people know about you, and let people know that your products exist. Then, they will start talking about it. Social Networking has played an important role in marketing over the recent years such as Multiply, Facebook, and Twitter. Aside from the normal menial task of updating clients about the company’s identity, information of the products and services one provides, and actual Point-of-Sale via online, these social medium also serve as the venue for people to interact, exchange experiences, comment on products, and spread positive or negative words about you.You can also check on how many people have liked your Facebook Page or have retweeted what you have just said. Unknown to many, they also provide applications like Facebook Insights and TweetReach that enables business owners to know how they fare in the social media market. These tools provide ample information as to the age and gender of their patrons, where these patrons are from, and how many people are talking, about them or their products. You can also see this through some blogs that provide, on their sidebar, the number of people who have visited their blog and where they are from, typically showing the flag of the country they are from. Another way to measure your efforts is through online searches. When you type your product or company name, does it generate pages other than yours? Do people post about you in their blogs? Do people talk about you? Are they proud to show off pictures of your products?

[The article has been written by Jessica Francisco. She is a cheerful 25-year-old with an odd sense of fun. The least of her broad range of hobbies include swimming, hiking and listening to the music of Michael Jackson. ]