As social media has become such a large and undefined group of applications, it can be difficult to identify which platforms will work best for your company. Social media is a fantastic way to experiment with marketing ideas, but unless you have clearly delineated, and auditable, targets, you’ll never know how truly successful any given campaign is – so, how do you set and track your social media targets?

Setting your targets is the same as for any other form of marketing – do you want to drive sales or increase engagement with your brand? Are you looking to create links back to your website or position yourself as a market thought-leader? Choosing just one or two clearly defined and focused aims will make selecting your platforms a lot easier; for example, a brand looking to engage will focus heavily on tools such as Twitter and Facebook, while one looking to share knowledge may prefer to utilise a social bookmark site, such as Digg.

Analysis should be undertaken monthly; this is a short enough time that you stay in control of your data, but long enough to hint at developing and emerging trends in your traffic. Many companies have their own form of analytical tool, but Google’s analytics is perfectly adequate if you don’t want to invest. Pick a handful of metrics to compare and focus on these figures month-to-month to see what effect any campaign is having. Possible metrics include bounce rate, source traffic and time on site.

Taking a focused approach will allow you to see where the strengths and weaknesses of your campaign lie, and adjust them accordingly, so that you are constantly improving your results.

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In the last couple of years social media has come to dominate digital marketing. It offers new and varied ways to share content, engage consumers and create dialogue. However, the sheer number of sites available and the scope for campaigns can leave even the most hardened marketer feeling overwhelmed.

So this week, NSDesign Social Media Training has a case study to help you pinpoint what makes a successful social media campaign. It’s from a surprising source – traditional brand Marmite, first established in 1902, and now leading the way in social media marketing.

Marmite has always revelled in its ‘controversial’ status and has run several traditional advertising campaigns around the love/ hate aspect of the product. To capitalise on the 2010 general election they conceived a social media equivalent, setting up ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ Facebook groups. Within four weeks they had 350,000 fans across the two groups, the result of a massive multi-media marketing push.

Why were they so successful? Marmite created a debate, which required people to actively think and engage with their brand; this created an online discussion between consumers and the brand, which created an excellent source of rich and original content, helping to boost the product’s online footprint.

They also used various mediums to draw attention and focus it on their social media. The main social media thrust was supported by traditional mediums such as TV and newer avenues like online forums, all of which drove traffic to the Facebook hubs. They even offered hard copy ‘electioneering’ packs to the most energetic fans.

Marmite has a lot of resources behind it, but the lessons can be applied to companies of all sizes, so that your social media campaign becomes all about the ‘Love’.

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If you are maintaining a website, you will have come across the term Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This is a fairly complicated and complex process of improving your website ranking (in search engines such as Google) and therefore increasing the number of visitors to your site. SEO may completely overwhelm you at first, but when broken down into sections you will find that the techniques are simple, easy to manage and produce excellent results.

Link building is a very important technique and one which will be sure to improve your ranking. It is the main process when you are looking to attract like-minded visitors in large numbers.  The rewards are tenfold; not only improving your ranking, but also ensuring your site becomes visible, recognised and credible to potential customers.

Basically, link building is a form of internet marketing, whereby you generate inbound links to your own website (from other sites). There are a number of ways to do this with the most popular being:

•    Reciprocal links with other sites, where two webmasters agree to show the other’s link on their website

•    Listing your site in online directories: a task which needs to be completed manually at first, but after a while, you will find that you are automatically listed in many online directories)

•    Placing content on blogs, forums and e-zines (either your own or other people’s)

Remember, that while link building can be time-consuming, it is a very easy technique which is still the most popular and efficient way to improve your website’s traffic and ranking in the search engines.

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If you read our blog, you will understand how important blogging is; especially for small businesses. It keeps you in touch with your customer base and allows you to demonstrate your expertise.

If you are setting up a blog, read our recent article about blog domain names before you start and either sign up to a free blogsite using one of the more popular blog sites such as wordpress.com or contact us if you want help integrating a blog into your business website.

It can be a bit overwhelming at first, especially if you are not used to writing; but remember that your blog is there to keep in touch with customers, promote new products, advise your customers, improve your internet marketing and generally show a more social side to your company.

It’s important always to keep the blog relevant to your business and to write regular updates. This will ensure that search engines such as Google pick up on the blog and improve your overall ranking on the internet. The higher ranked your website/blog is, the more people will come across it when running internet searches.

Once you start blogging, you will find that it provides fresh content for your website and keeps customers coming back.  You are providing a free service for them while at the same time enhancing your own business.

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Facebook is so ubiquitous that, whatever line of business you’re in, it’s likely many of your customers and potential customers are using the site to socialise and network. There are over 350 million active users of the world’s largest social network and, even though it was originally designed to help students plan their social lives, it has quickly evolved into a powerful internet marketing tool for businesses.

In the same way that individuals can set up profile pages, businesses can set up fan pages. You can upload your logo and company description to the page and post updates, links and photos on your wall. People can indicate they “like” your page, and your updates will then appear in their news feeds. A description of your page will also feature on your fans’ individual profiles. Given that the average Facebook user has 130 friends (according to Facebook’s own calculation), you can theoretically put your business in front of 13,000 people with just 100 fans!

You can also use a Facebook fan page to drive traffic to your website by posting links to your latest blog or news articles on the wall.

It’s easy to set up a Facebook fan page for your business: just click on this link and follow the instructions.

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