By definition, Traffic and Monetisation are the starting points for commercial social media. The trick is to understand how to get there. We have detected a theme that supports Social Media as being more like SEO than PPC as a method for driving traffic. You cannot buy into Social Media as effectively as you can with PPC, although you can buy PPC across Social Media sites.

For Social Media marketing to be effective there is plenty of evidence to suggest that you have to plan a campaign and adapt to the changes in methodologies and business models.

Social Media success is measured in terms of opt-in, influence and engagement. The numbers involved are multi dimensional in texture and depth they are beyond counting page views, as it is possible to calculate and, as a result influence market sentiment toward your brand through engagement.

In terms of Social Media traffic, you cannot simply buy it, in the same way as you do for Pay Per Click, yet achieving traffic via social media techniques is not free (you have to earn it). It takes effort and a strategy to create engaging and thoughtful commentary that touches on the heart of the subject that you wish to target. Like SEO, Social Media has at its heart content, albeit richer and varied. The heart of content is keyword analysis, but in Social Media terms we now look at keyword trends and word clouds.

In terms of monetisation it is not so much about selling things to viewers, it is that visitors decide to buy in and click. Currently I am up to eight distinct business models in social media and we can see at least a further four. To me this range blurs the distinction between web 1.0 and 2.0 but that would have to be the subject of another post.

So the top tip here is to do your keyword analysis, you can start with google keywords, a very web 1.0 approach and then you can look for tools such as twilert and many others (some with significantly more depth) to identify subject orientated posts, keyword clouds and trend analysis. You will need to read the posts and have them scored, segmented, compare view counts and understand the depth and sentiment relative to the key word, timing and other contexts.

Although there are some similarities with SEO, Social Media analytics is a far deeper subject than Web Analytics has been, and needs more attention and commercial commitment.  It is rumoured that Google will be getting into this space very soon…