Getting your online business involved with social media is one of the best moves you can make because it allows you to develop relationships with your customers and get your message out to a potentially larger audience. While using social media has become common for business purposes, many websites/blogs do not measure the impact of their social media efforts. If you really want to take your social media to the next level, start measuring your social media influence.
Why is Measuring Social Media Influence Important?
One of the reasons that social networking is so important for your business is that it can drive large amounts of traffic to your blog or website. Many people use social networking as a way to get links or to simply increase brand awareness. However, if you are not using it as a traffic-building strategy, you are essentially selling yourself short.
If you use the right strategies, you can develop a potentially large amount of free traffic for any blog regardless of niche. It doesn’t matter what your blog is about, using social media can help you find people who are interested in the subject matter. The nice thing about getting traffic from social media sites is that you don’t have to pay for it.
SEO Rising Star
If you are in the process of building your own website, you understand the importance of doing well in SEO or search engine optimization. For many years, getting links from relevant sites has been the most important factor for ranking well in search engines. With recent changes in search engine algorithms, many people are starting to notice the importance of doing well in social media.
When people start mentioning a particular site or “Liking” a page on Facebook, the search engines take notice. Many search engine optimization experts are saying that social media activity is actually one of the most important factors when it comes to search engine rankings. If you want to get ahead of the curve, you’ll put a lot more emphasis on getting your content shared on social networking sites.
Measuring Your Impact
Now that you understand the importance of getting involved in social media for your business and your site, you may be wondering how to measure the impact of your actions. Luckily, there are a number of tools that you can use to do just that. For example, one of the most common ways to measure your social media impact is with Klout.
Klout is a service that aims to measure the level of influence that you have on social networks when you interact. It measures how many people are impacted by the content or messages that you post. For example, it takes into consideration how many people retweet your tweets on Twitter. It filters out the robots and other programs that aren’t real people. It then assigns you a Klout score that you can use to see how much impact your actions have.
Empire Avenue, WhoSay, TweetStats, My Web Career, and TwentyFeet are some other services that offer similar measurements of your reach in the social networking sphere. Any of these tools can be beneficial when it comes to figuring out how many people you are actually impacting when you get involved with social networking sites.
It is your job as a webmaster to increase your social networking reach and get involved with more people. As you do this, more people will start to come to your site and visit it regularly. This will result in more traffic, higher search engine rankings, and ultimately more conversions. If you’re not focusing on social networking statistics currently, make it a big priority moving forward.
