by samIt’s pretty common knowledge now that having a social media presence is a vital part of Internet marketing, but simply using a range of social networks does not necessarily mean success. It’s important to know the extent to which your online activity is influencing people. If your SMO efforts aren’t having any effect, then they’re simply not working. So how can you find out if you’re having an effect online?
Increasingly popular social influence analysis tools like ‘Klout’ and ‘Twitter Counter’ can give you a score based on the online activity that informs you of the “range” of your online presence.
What’s especially useful about these services is that they can specifically tell you the topics that you’re most influential on, the people that you influence the most, a day-by-day series of charts summarising the growth of your online presence over the past number of days, and often predictions of how many followers you could potentially achieve shortly if your pattern of growth remains as consistent as it already has been. In other words, pretty much all the vital statistics you want are available at a glance. The only thing it doesn’t provide you with is the knowledge of how to increase your score.
Upon seeing the results, some may be a little shocked to see how infrequently they’re getting through to people. A company could have 100,000 followers on Twitter, which seems fantastic on paper, but if they’re only engaging with 1,000 of them regularly, then they’re barely reaching 10% of your potential customer base through SMO. In these cases, recruiting the help of an online marketing company can aid in boosting this.
As far as Internet marketing is concerned, getting through to your audience and building a mutually beneficial and social relationship with them is vital to creating a loyal following. The growing number of helpful services like this has made it increasingly easy for companies to realise how much they could improve their online effectiveness with a little professional help.