Dr. Horst Joepen , Searchmetrics - Social Media
It used to be if you didn’t have a web page that could be found by Google and other search engines, the public thought you didn’t exist. Today, the same thing is true with social media. If you do not have a Facebook Business or Place page, don’t Tweet, or have a LinkedIn profile, customers wonder about your commitment to your business.
In addition, businesses who don’t utilize social media are missing out on the ability to communicate with and market to an increasingly large number of customers. How large? Well, in 1997, the Internet reached 50 million users. Between January 2009 and January 2010, Facebook alone gained 100 million users – a 145% growth rate for that one year. With social media, you can invite customers to learn about your brand in a way not possible with traditional marketing and advertising.
However, the problem is that unlike traditional marketing and advertising or even SEO and SEM, it’s almost next to impossible to measure the impact and value of social media – especially when you consider all the channels out there. Facebook, Google +1, Delicious, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon, just to name a few of the top social media sites, all have different users and different benefits. It’s virtually impossible to compare and quantify social marketing. Do you know the number of Facebook ‘likes’ vs. ‘shares’ vs. ‘comments’ for your website? Do you know how this compares with your competitors? Can you combine this with detailed analyses of LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Delicious, and StumbleUpon?
Without this capability, social media marketing becomes just another shot in dark – an intuitive sense, rather than a campaign based on customer analytics. Searchmetrics offers a tool we call Searchmetrics Essentials that measures “social visibility.” The social visibility score Searchmetrics Essentials calculates factors in trillions of points of data from today’s leading social networks to visually show the social media presence of brands. A social visibility score is calculated using all forms of social activity: Likes, shares, posts, tweets, and more, and can be pinpointed down to a URL.
Capturing quantitative benefits for the first time
Here’s a practical example of how Searchmetrics’ tool can be used to analyze a domain or company’s social visibility: between May and the end of August 2011, we calculated the social visibility of various news outlets. We found that among the traditional U.S. newspapers, the New York Times leads in social media visibility followed by the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times and USA Today. Searchmetrics found the New York Times’ social visibility score to be 110 million with more than 50 million social Links found. By comparison, according to our data, the Huffington Post leads with a social visibility score of 136 million, outperforming the New York Times. Of course, this may be an indicator that the Huffington Post’s target demographic is much more socially visible overall than traditional media.
In addition, businesses who don’t utilize social media are missing out on the ability to communicate with and market to an increasingly large number of customers. How large? Well, in 1997, the Internet reached 50 million users. Between January 2009 and January 2010, Facebook alone gained 100 million users – a 145% growth rate for that one year. With social media, you can invite customers to learn about your brand in a way not possible with traditional marketing and advertising.
However, the problem is that unlike traditional marketing and advertising or even SEO and SEM, it’s almost next to impossible to measure the impact and value of social media – especially when you consider all the channels out there. Facebook, Google +1, Delicious, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon, just to name a few of the top social media sites, all have different users and different benefits. It’s virtually impossible to compare and quantify social marketing. Do you know the number of Facebook ‘likes’ vs. ‘shares’ vs. ‘comments’ for your website? Do you know how this compares with your competitors? Can you combine this with detailed analyses of LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Delicious, and StumbleUpon?
Without this capability, social media marketing becomes just another shot in dark – an intuitive sense, rather than a campaign based on customer analytics. Searchmetrics offers a tool we call Searchmetrics Essentials that measures “social visibility.” The social visibility score Searchmetrics Essentials calculates factors in trillions of points of data from today’s leading social networks to visually show the social media presence of brands. A social visibility score is calculated using all forms of social activity: Likes, shares, posts, tweets, and more, and can be pinpointed down to a URL.
Capturing quantitative benefits for the first time
Here’s a practical example of how Searchmetrics’ tool can be used to analyze a domain or company’s social visibility: between May and the end of August 2011, we calculated the social visibility of various news outlets. We found that among the traditional U.S. newspapers, the New York Times leads in social media visibility followed by the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times and USA Today. Searchmetrics found the New York Times’ social visibility score to be 110 million with more than 50 million social Links found. By comparison, according to our data, the Huffington Post leads with a social visibility score of 136 million, outperforming the New York Times. Of course, this may be an indicator that the Huffington Post’s target demographic is much more socially visible overall than traditional media.
We drilled down even further and looked closely at NYTimes.com URLs to chart how successful particular articles were within the medium. Warren Buffet’s petition for higher taxes, “Top Coddling the Super Rich” (published August 18, 2010), was over six times more visible than the announcement of the death of Osama Bin Laden.
This shows you how it’s easy to quantify the value social media can bring to your content, but what does all this mean for companies using social media for marketing purposes? A few things. The first thing is that knowing this information is crucial because the social media revolution has a strong impact on any online business. The ‘likes,’ tweets, and +1s from Facebook, Twitter and Google + 1 are new, but might already be very important ranking factors for search engines. With the Google Freshness and Panda updates, companies learned quickly that content was king. The more quality, relevant content you provide drives search engine results. Customers sharing and liking your content seems to improve results as well – without significant investment on your part, besides time and knowledge about what your users really like about you and your competitors.
The second thing that the example above tells us is that armed with both the social and SEO visibility of your brand, you are able to see the true reach of your social media content. This means you can see instantly what resonates with customers – actually how many users “shared” or “liked” your post – and adjust your marketing campaigns accordingly. This helps you build brand loyalty (by “giving” customers what they want) and generates more word of mouth marketing. With any social media ROI calculation, though, you should be able to distinguish between absolute quantity (i.e. social visibility) and the rate of growth (i.e. the number of new social links per week).
The implications for savvy marketers are enormous. Social networks continue only to grow in importance. Facebook now has 800 million (and growing) active users. LinkedIn has 100 million users. More than 200 million tweets are sent each day. Social media is a great way to build brand awareness and have easy high-touch, honest interactions with your customers – turning them from enthusiastic (but passive) fans into transacting customers. And now you can allocate the right amount of resources, in these places, to make sure your brand succeeds and measure this success.
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