Social media has become an integral part of smart marketing strategies. Most top companies retain at least one social-media expert, and some have a slew of consultants focusing on social strategies.
Companies will increase their digital marketing budgets an average of 17% in 2010, with social media driving much of that increase, according to research by eConsultancy..
In fact, for many companies, social networks have become a larger source of referral traffic than search. But although most companies understand that they need to embrace social media to drive word-of-mouth traffic, their resources focus almost entirely on the social experience that takes place off their own website,- and on the associated metrics.
That means marketers are spending millions of dollars, often on paid-search campaigns, to bring visitors to their websites, but their social strategy helps send those visitors away.
For example, a visitor arrives at a top clothing retailer's website after clicking a specific search term, clicks a link to "Join our community on Facebook," and is redirected to Facebook.com. That's a potential customer who may never return.
Many businesses also maintain a Twitter account or seed videos into YouTube. Marketers typically have in-house teams, outside experts, and a host of agencies working on their off-site social marketing, monitoring, and community interaction, all of which are extremely important.
But the key questions businesses should ask are the following: What am I doing to optimize my own site to drive social participation and socially referred traffic? and How do I measure success?
On-Site: The Other Half of Social Marketing
What do Facebook, Twitter, and the other social platforms think about marketers' optimizing their own sites for social activity and traffic? It may come as a surprise that they see such site engagement as the wave of the future and provide technologies to enable it.
The new generation of social-connectivity technologies allows you to deeply integrate your site with the social-network platforms, which means everything from registering users with an extant social identity, to making it easy for them to share content with social-network friends, to building site experiences that incorporate friends.
Such technologies—from Facebook Connect, to Sign in with Twitter, to Y!OS and MySpace—offer unique access to the social-network platforms that any website can tap into.
The Huffington Post, for example, uses those technologies to enable visitors to register using their Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn, or other identity. HuffPo can access user profile data to prepopulate registration form fields to streamline the process. HuffPo also has access to the user's profile photo and demographic data, which it can use to customize the site experience.
Once connected, HuffPo members can see not only what content was most popular among the entire Huffington Post community but also which stories were most popular among their own network of Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, or other friends. Then with a single click and without ever leaving the HuffPo site, users can share content with their social networks, driving friends to the HuffPo site.
Seven Key Metrics
With those new technologies come new key performance metrics that fall into three areas: registration, sharing, and traffic.
Registration. Enabling users to register or sign in using a social identity not only streamlines the process but also lays the foundation for a deeper relationship with your customers.
User preferences and social-network terms of service notwithstanding, when users sign in with a social identity, they give your site access to demographic and even interest data that can help you customize and personalize the user experience.
You also get access to an email address that has already been verified by the social network, eliminating the need for an email confirmation process.
