Measure Your Online Presence

As you mentioned last week, you’re on social media, now what? After you start engaging your community and providing valuable content (after all, that’s the whole point of Web 2.0), you want to see if its working right? Social media can do so many things for your company including creating a closer community, building brand value, and increasing awareness. It is hard to give hard numbers to prove its worth to you and to your boss. The good thing is that the web is full of metrics.

First, look at some of the basics like website visits including where they are from, Facebook likes, Twitter followers, etc. You should slowly see increases in each of them. For specific metrics, we use sites like Twitter Counter (see graphic on right), Twitaholic, and Twitter Grader. Twitter Counter shows a steady increase in followers over the last 6 months while Twitaholic shows your rank in the Twitterverse such as 184,875th for us (actually not bad for our narrow vertical audience). One of our favorites is Twitter Grader, part of Hub Spot’s grader.com series, because it looks at more than just followers and retweets and gives you a full report including steps to increase your score. We regularly score around 95 out of 100! Another great thing about these tools, besides they are all free, is that they are open to view other tweeters – just add the username and you get their metrics.

For a more universal metric that reviews everything, we recommend Klout and Marketing Grader (also part of the grader.com series). Klout aggregates all of your social media and continually adds other media channels, although we’re still waiting on the blog feature to be added. Own of our favorite features is the Style guide that shows what you talk about – as you can see, we stay pretty focused and consistent on our topics of construction, branding, marketing, social media, and AEC. Marketing Grader, formerly website grader, takes everything into consideration including your blog, social media channels, website, and overall online presence and gives you a highly detailed report. Don’t feel bad about getting low scores on either of these, they are tough and take time to improve. Beware, abandoning your social media for only a couple of weeks can reek havoc over your scores – trust me, a vacation including a hectic schedule just before and after vacation dropped our score.

It is always hard to measure the effectiveness of marketing and social media, but these tools make it possible.