Part of our marketing efforts in our web analytics company is concentrated on generating interest about our clients websites on social media networks. Viral marketing through social media can be extremely time-consuming and draining, especially if client offers products and services that are not really ideal for generating the buzz. However, the masses of SMN online visitors help increase web traffic and search engine rankings which are crucial for our customers.
As you may well know, social media represent a wide variety of not marketing but personal communication tools. All these online networks appeared for the needs of social communications not for advancing the agenda of the marketing companies. However, some of our clients try to get from us some kind of traditional “measurements” that will allow them to calculate retun on investments in this case.
Naturally, it is completely natural to understand the result from campaigns conducted through natural marketing channels. It is relatively easy to put numeric quantities, report the results, count conversions e.t.c. Unfortunately, it is not possible to create viable metrics on conversations and other human interactions, which is what the social media is about.
Social media was not invented for marketers, millions of Internet visitors use it to communicate and interact, exchange opinions. Internet marketing companies hope to stream some of those visitors to the clients websites, in other words to take advantage of the existing online SMN subscribers.
I would say that the better criteria for measurements from viral marketing will be the number of positive interactions of clients websites with the masses, web traffic increase, and, possibly, the number of positive exchanges between the websites in question and Internet visitors coming from SMN.