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With the rapidly increasing use of social media tools for marketing and PR comes growing pressure to demonstrate results. But what metrics are really most appropriate for social media measurement? How can you monitor everything that’s being said about your company, competitors and key industry topics across the social media landscape without spending a fortune on monitoring software? Is your social media strategy built on a solid foundation, or is it more like a Hollywood movie set—a pretty facade with nothing behind it? Which tools are most important for social media participation, analyzing what’s being said, and separating important substance from the noise?

Discover the answers to these questions and others here in more of the best posts on social media from this year.

ROI Is Dead by StraightUpSearch

This post suggests that marketers should focus on a different ROI when calculating the value of social media efforts: “return on insight.” Traditional ROI measures fail to take into account the search value of social media engagement, as well as the value of the customer service and product enhancements that social listening and interaction can provide.

Facebook Lets Users Open Up Profiles by MediaPost Online Media Daily

Mark Walsh helpfully outlines the recent changes Facebook has made to its privacy settings, though noting that “profiles opened to everyone, however, will still not turn up in searches on Google or other outside search engines.“

How to Build a Reputation Monitoring Dashboard by aimClear

Marty Weintraub provides a remarkable and highly detailed guide to setting up a social media reputation monitoring dashboard using free tools such as Google Alerts, iGoogle, Google Analytics, and keyword tools along with Excel. The set up takes some time, but the end result is a powerful monitoring tool without the cost of a paid social media monitoring application. This tutorial is clear and generously illustrated with screenshots.

Is Your Online Marketing Strategy All Tweet and No Meat? by HubSpot

Rick Burnes notes that without a strong content strategy to back up social media efforts, marketers risk the “all hat, no cattle” syndrome: lots of attention on Twitter and Facebook, but no compelling content to back it up and turn the curious into the converted. Compelling thought-leadership content, blog posts, white papers, video and SEO efforts support and create long-term value for social media tactics.

A free DIY approach to social media by iMedia Connection

Rebecca Weeks provides a “cheat sheet” with five key tactics to increase website traffic through social media, including interaction on the most popular social networking sites, using free Twitter tools to maximize the value of that platform, and getting exposure on social news sites. Another noteworthy post from this publication is Facebook is a Personal CRM for Baby Boomers, in which Daniel Flamberg reports on an Accenture study showing that in early 2009, “boomers posted a 59 percent increase in use of social networks; a rate of adoption 30 times faster than any other age group.” Facebook’s InsideFacebook blog reports that in February and March of this year, the number of Facebook users age 35 and over doubled. Boomers use Facebook somewhat differently than younger age groups as well; Flamberg notes that “they are more reticent to share information, less likely to leave comments and a bit slower to join groups.”

8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams by Social Media Today

Noting that with the collective millions of tweets produced every day, there is “an emerging demand to sieve signals from noises and harvest useful information,” Yung-Hui Lim reviews Twitter analytics tools that can help with the task, including Twitalyzer, Trendistic (formerly Twist), Twitt(url)y and TweetStats.

What’s In Your Social Media Toolkit? by Dave Fleet

In this short but useful post, Dave Fleet outlines the set of social media tools he finds most useful on a daily basis, such as Google Reader for keeping up with blogs, Twitter for real-time communications, Radian6 for social media monitoring, and LinkedIn for social networking.

Previous posts in this series:

Best of 2009 (So Far): Social Media Marketing, Part 1
Best of 2009 (S0 Far): AdWords Tips and Tactics, Part 1
Best of 2009 (So Far): Blogging for Business, Part 1
Best of 2009 (So Far): SEO Guidance, Part 1
Best of 2009 (So Far): Cool Web Tools, Part 1
Best of 2009 (So Far): Twitter Tips and Tactics, Part 1
Best of 2009 (So Far): Social Media Marketing, Part 2
Best of 2009 (So Far): AdWords Tips and Tactics, Part 2
Best of 2009 (So Far): SEO Guidance, Part 2
Best of 2009 (So Far): Cool Web Tools, Part 2
Best of 2009 (So Far): Search Engine Marketing
Best of 2009 (So Far): Social Media Marketing, Part 3
Best of 2009 (So Far): SEO Guidance, Part 3
Best of 2009 (So Far): Blogging for Business, Part 2
Best of 2009 (So Far): Twitter Tips and Tactics, Part 2
Best of 2009 (So Far): SEO Guidance, Part 4

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Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Credit:
Best of 2009 (So Far): Social Media Marketing, Part 4

Tags: aimclear, daniel-flamberg, dave-fleet, facebook, hubspot, igoogle, mark-walsh, marty-weintraub, radian6, rebecca-weeks, rick-burnes, social-media-marketing, social-media-monitoring, social-media-strategy, social-news-sites, trendistic, twitalyzer, twitturly, yung-hui-lim

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 6:59 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.