Outsource My Social Media Marketing

www.socialstarter.com Regardless of how your company chooses to approach social media it is essential that you have a success metric in mind before you begin because without defining some sort of benchmark, it’s impossible to determine your ROI.

We got the opportunity to speak to webmetricsguru.com’s Marshall Sponder about how metrics and measurement are paramount in the current social media landscape.

Business executives have big plans on where they’ll be putting their budget dollars in 2010. According to a new survey by StrongMail, business executives plan to push their new budgets toward email marketing (69% respondents), social media (59% respondents), and SEO (42% respondents).

Even though email and social media integration is a trend that has been growing for some time now, the chart below absolutely confirms the vast room for improvement and growth.

While nearly half of respondents have formulated (or integrated) a strategy that incorporates social media into their company’s email campaigns already, 18% of respondents who have yet to implement an integrated email & social media strategy say they’d like to, but have no idea where to start.

Interestingly, out of the 27% of respondents who claim to have already integrated social media into their email marketing strategy, thirty-five percent are reporting no improvement in their campaign performance. Even more shocking is that 23% of companies currently using social media in their email campaigns still do not know how to measure their results.

Quick Tips on How to Measure Integrated Email & Social Media Campaigns

The data that I find most disturbing is the number of worldwide companies who are implementing social media campaigns without clear ideas on how to measure their results.

Use a “Tweet It” Button and Measure the Clicks and Distance Your Tweet Travels

One way you can track qualitative results is by using a “Tweet It” button in your emails. You can set your “Tweet It” button’s pre-prepared text. This is the lazy-tweet that your twitterers can share with their network. By searching for the text of this pre-prepared text on Twitter Search or other tools, you can see how far your text has traveled. You can also measure the success of this button using quantitative metrics (supplied by your email provider) that report how many people have clicked on the “Tweet It” button.

Monitor Shared Links with a Bit.ly Account

You can also measure the success of your social media campaign by creating a Bit.ly account. Bit.ly is a free link shortener that can help you track how many times people have shared your link via Twitter and other social networks. Place your Bit.ly links in the pre-prepared text of your “Tweet It” Button.

Use Analytics Provided By Your Email Provider

Any email service provider will track clicks for you, too – so you can see how many people click on your social media buttons on your email. This way you’ll be able to discover which Social Media sites you want to incorporate into your emails and where they most like to share your information online.