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Chuck Price, November 24, 2013 | searchenginewatch.com

One of the most challenging tasks in selling digital marketing to the C-Suite is defining the return on investment (ROI). It can be particularly challenging when justifying the budget for social media marketing (SMM).

Many SMM efforts lend themselves to brand building, community building, and customer service. Unlike "traditional" SEO, these activities aren't always transactional in nature.

Marketing ROI has traditionally been measured like this:

Return on Investment (%) = (Net profit / Marketing Costs) × 100.

Sometimes, cost per customer acquisition is the measure. As recently as 2010, the dawn of social media marketing, those in the C-Suite attempted to apply the tried and true transactional ROI model to SMM. The CMO Survey, as reported by Forbes, lists the most common metrics used to measure social media investment.

By 2013, only 9 percent of marketers were using traditional ROI metrics, down from 17 percent in the initial survey. The reason: many social media activities can't be effectively measured using a transactional formula. SMM is often best measured in terms of audience reach, engagement and sentiment.

That said, there are highly successful direct response campaigns that run on Facebook and other social networks every day. These approaches deliver an ROI that can easily be measured the old-fashioned way. Pam Dyer lists 10 here. If that isn't enough, Rob Petersen has another six examples.

Business Insider recently published a story on the death of social ROI. They claim that companies are starting to drop the idea that social media ROI can be measured.

I asked Nicole Harrison (@SocialNicole) about this and the importance of ROI in social media. She was adamant that social media done correctly will deliver results and recommended the following list of 11 free tools for measuring both ROI and social media success.

1. HootSuite

HootSuite is a good all around tool to use for management and metrics tracking. You can schedule posts from multiple social media channels as well as create over 30 individual reports. The free metrics are somewhat limited, but for beginners it's all you will need.

2. SocialMention

SocialMention is an aggregate tool similar to Google Alerts, but for social media, only. This will give you insight into not only what is being said, but who is saying it and what the general sentiment is.

You can set an RSS feed, email alerts, or even add a real-time widget to your website. You can also download a CSV/Excel file for further evaluation.

3. Klout

Monitoring influence isn't an exact science, but having a tool that helps you begin to gage someone's online presence can be useful. Klout is a free tool that will allow you to measure influence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and several other channels.

4. Facebook Insights

The Facebook insights dashboard gives you all of the analytics data for your Facebook page. The insights allow you to understand your audience, what they are reacting to, and adjust your content to meet their needs.

5. Twitter Analytics

Twitter now has its own analytics dashboard. With Twitter Analytics you can track timeline activity, including tweets that were favorited, retweeted, and replied to. The tool also tracks number of mentions, new followers and newly followed. For more information, see "Twitter Analytics: A Beginner's Guide".

6. Google Analytics

With Google Analytics Campaign Tracking, you can set up links for campaigns with UTM parameters to track the campaign. Go here to create the link using Google link shortener for campaigns.

This is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to track success of a specific link within a campaign. It's also one of the most overlooked methods of tracking.

7. Custom Social Media Reports

Google Analytics does a nice job tracking the number of visitors to visit a website from different social channels. These custom reports give you additional insights as to how traffic is being driven to your website.

If you aren't blogging or creating new and useful content to draw people to your website, don't expect these numbers to be high. It requires a content strategy to really work people toward your website. These easy to install one-click reports are invaluable.

8. Bitly

This link shortener allows you track everything you share. This is a great way to see what your audience is interacting with and decide if the content you share is valuable.

Bitly also integrates into many third-party software packages, making it a great umbrella tool, as you can track within multiple platforms. For example, you may use Social Sprout, a paid management platform and Buffer both with Bitly then review data in individual platforms or as a whole through Bitly.

9. Buffer

Buffer is a great tool for scheduling content. You simply fill up your Buffer account each day and it will automatically post the content to the channels you select.

For metrics, you're able to look at a dashboard inside Buffer to see what posts are getting the most interaction, or attach it to Bitly to include in your general tracking. You can also attach UTM parameters to track traffic in Google Analytics.

10. TweetReach

TweetReach is a great tool for tracking a campaign or conversation on Twitter. Simply enter your search term or hashtag and allow TweetReach to search for the tweets to tell you reach, exposure, activity, top contributors, and more. You can look at the past 50 mentions for free.

11. Keyhole

Keyhole is similar to TweetReach except that it also tracks Facebook and Instagram as well as Twitter. This is a great way to track a hashtag or keyword for a campaign or event.

The free social tracker gives you a sample of what the tracker can do. If you signup you can get a three-day free trial, which may be adequate for an event or snapshot view of a campaign. To get a long-term view you can sign up for a monthly paid plan.

Summary

Measuring social media ROI isn't always easy. Building a brand and improving your customer service may not show up directly in your analytics, but these "soft" metrics can have a major impact on the bottom line.

Do you have any tools or measurable SMM success stories to share?

by Chad Pollitt

digitialrelevance

The title of this article is a direct quote from Jonathan Perelman of BuzzFeed and was featured in Ryan Skinner’s article, “Great Content Is Not Enough,” on the Forrester blog. The article features takeaways from Ryan’s most recent Forrester report called “Put Distribution at the Heart of Content Marketing.” The report is a great read for today’s marketing and public relations professionals and explains why only 36 percent of marketers who use content feel they use it effectively.

The False Debate

This year has seen many thought leaders chime in on the quantity versus quality content argument. Marketers are trying to find the right balance. The more time they spend on quality, the less time they have for production. Seems like a fair concern, right?

Here’s the problem: 64 percent of content marketers feel they don’t use content effectively. That represents a whole lot of campaigns. It’s likely that some of them are focusing on quality while others are primarily focused on quantity. Neither approach guarantees results. However, the end goal is the same: publishing great content that gets shared on social media and ranks high in the search engines.

The amount of content being published online is growing exponentially and content marketers are partially to blame. In June of 2000, there were fewer than eight million websites. Today that number is greater than 750 million, according to Netcraft.com, and shows no signs of slowing down. This means that it will be harder and harder for marketers to cut through the noise in order to get their content read. Great content goes unread everyday on the Internet.

Google is helping to fuel this debate, too. With its Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird algorithm updates and the “Freshness” indexing update to Caffeine, Google is essentially telling marketers to publish as much content as possible and to make sure it’s extremely helpful to the people that read it if they want to do well on the search engine.

Unfortunately, the debate itself blinds content marketers to why their campaigns are performing poorly. Some may add another layer of editing and/or ideation in an attempt to boost the quality of their campaigns. Others may decide to ramp up production to get the results they’re lacking. Neither of the two tackles the real problem—lack of a distribution strategy.

The Right Debate

Rather than trying to produce more or better content, marketers should focus on their distribution plans. It should be part of their overall strategy. However, it’s likely just an afterthought for most of the 64 percent of marketers who feel they’re not using their content effectively. So rather than debating quality versus quantity, marketers should be debating on how much to spend on promotion.

Here are a few remarkable findings featured in Ryan Skinner’s article:

• Brands can actually step down content production and step up distribution to get better results.
• An ecosystem of vendors have cropped up to help marketers drive distribution of branded content.
• The most effective promotions often come from doubling-down on past successes.
• Better distribution improves content’s quality, as the feedback cycle accelerates.

By focusing on distribution using paid and earned channels, content marketers can hasten their traffic, conversions, subscribership and regular readership.

Paid Content Distribution

There are many services available to help marketers with their content distribution endeavors. Companies like Outbrain, Adblade, aNEWSme and OneSpot are all paid services that distribute content in a native or advertorial manner. These services can place a company’s content in front of millions of eyeballs.

Earned Content Distribution

Content marketers can take a page from traditional public relations by reaching out to the media in order to earn coverage which will assist with distribution. The alternative is to rely on luck. Unfortunately, luck isn’t very predictable. This article itself is earned media for Forrester’s blog post and report earned via luck.

By proactively reaching out and pitching influencers, editors and journalists, marketers can get their content organically featured in some of the most populous corners of the Internet. This one example shows how earned media coverage from one popular online media outlet drove over 1,200 business leads in just a few weeks.  The Inbound Marketer’s Guide to Earned Media takes a deep dive into how to use the media to help with content promotion.

If 2013 is the year of content marketing, let’s hope that 2014 will be the year of content promotion. Too many marketers are forgetting about promotion; instead, they believe the answers to their content marketing woes are to produce more and better content. As mentioned above, everyday great content goes unread. Without a promotion strategy like the ones previously described, the vast majority of content being created and published by the brands across this country will continue to go unread.

Google Hummingbird:  New Algorithm & What You Need To Know 

For the past few weeks I'd seen a pattern repeating itself across the board with most of the clients that Ido SEO and content marketing for, small drops in Page Authority and Domain Authority for every domain I was monitoring. I also observed some big leaps up the SERPs for content that was previously ranking poorly.

On September 26 2013 Google admitted that a new algorithm had been up and running for the past month. Panda and Penguin were updates which changed part of the algorithm, but Hummingbird has replaced the old algorithm and it’s the biggest change in 3 years. It’s not just a major update or refresh, it’s an entirely new ranking algorithm.

This news comes  on the heels of Google’s announcement that in future, all searches will be secure and as such, keyword data will no longer be available in Google Analytics. Not only this, but many website owners have spent the last few months dealing with the effects of the major Penguin refresh which hit earlier this year and had far reaching effects, making ‘bad’ SEO not just unsuccessful, but ensuring guilty websites were actively penalized.

Hummingbird aims to deliver results which are precise and fast.

Whilst specifics are still somewhat patchy, Google has confirmed that Hummingbird focuses on ranking information based on more intelligent and naturalistic search requests. In short, Google is getting smarter and is now better able to understand the relationships and relevance of words and phrases, instead of just considering individual words.

Google Hummingbird At A Glance

•Many of the existing rules and weightings still apply, so don’t stop doing what you are doing if your activities are based on Penguin pleasing, sustainable and ethical content focused techniques

•About 90% of all searches are likely to be affected by Hummingbird.

•Known as Semantic search, more naturalistic or ‘conversational’ search terms (which tend to be long-tail in their nature) are now more important than ever

•Google still wants to return the most relevant, accurate and useful search results to its users.

   Hummingbird provides a more sophisticated means for Google to deliver this

•There is now less emphasis on individual keywords and more emphasis on their collective (semantic) meaning

•PageRank remains an active ranking signal and Google claims that there is nothing massively different that SEOs need to be doing or worrying about

Summary

If you’ve not noticed any significant changes in the last month, then it looks like you’ve escaped unscathed. Some of the effects we’ve seen have been small however and could easily be missed, including small losses in Domain Authority and drops down SERPs for some previously highly ranking content, while other, less obvious content has risen up.

For some time now, the emphasis has been upon providing useful, high quality content on websites and blogs and upon optimizing content towards long tail keywords. This simply means that future SEO activities will be more focused on longer, semantic search terms. In real terms, for those who have already adapted their content marketing and SEO following the Penguin update earlier this year, very little is likely to change.

S R Bryan Social Media Today

I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know your RPS Gold package has Visistat Web Analytics tool integrated in your package. What can Web Analytics do to improve your bottom line?

• Web Analytics can help you identify keywords people are searching on to find your website
• Web Analytics can also prepare you and your team for higher lead conversion to sales rates. 

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