If you have been following my posts, you would know that  last time I spoke on Social Media Monitoring and its importance. In this post I will be talking about the importance of measuring social media campaign to evaluate it’s effectiveness.

Social Media should be used in a well planned way around your Objectives or Product. The key things which are cyclic in a well structured Social Media Strategy are:

1. Planning in advance
2. Designing your path
3. Execution
4. Measurement and review

Social Media Campaigns take time to show tangible results.  One should have some clarity in what needs to be done. Measure the engagement and plan your next step accordingly.

Measuring Social media is not just about the traffic or conversions that you get. Make sure you measure the conversations, search, and the influencers. Later measure the provoking level of the involvement, interaction and influence your campaign creates with consumers. To get a full picture make sure you put together all the factors of monitoring and measuring your campaign along with web site analytics.

We have Free and Paid tools to monitor these.  A tool like Radian6 might give you influencer insight where as a tool like Sysomos can help you in sentiment analysis. Even free tools like Socialmention, Samepoint help in evaluating your efforts.

Success or failure in Social Media depends on the engagement level that you are able to create and better understanding of your efforts.

Contributed by Muralidhar Bhat

Link building is a process of increasing the number of links pointing to your site from other sites on the Web. Building links is one of the most important factors in getting top placements on the major search engines.

There are three primary reasons to build links;

1. Direct Click-Through Traffic
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and
3. Help save advertising costs

The goal of most search engine optimization and social media marketing campaigns is to build traffic and higher rankings. Link building can be done in many ways, it is difficult and time intensive but when done properly it is worth the effort.

Most effective ways of link building:

1. News and Article Syndication
2. Directories & Social Bookmarking
3. Q&A sites
4. Forums and discussion centers.
5. Blogs and blog commenting.

There are many other ways of increasing links like Advertisements, Giveaways and Conferences & Social Interactions. All these processes take time and can lead to spam if not done properly. Link dropping has to be done carefully in a relevant, good site and should have content similar to your site.

Contributed by Ganesh Vel