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Social Media is a big conversation piece at the moment, particularly within smaller businesses who believe they should get involved because they think it will help their organisation grow.
Before you go headlong into starting your new inbound marketing campaign you must answer these 4 big questions.
  1. What are you goals?
  2. Who will continue the social media effort after the initial launch?
  3. How will you measure success?
  4. Are there other benefits to using social media?

The three key business motivations for using social media are:
Financial - Customer Support - Brand Building
Let's take a closer look at each motivation and see how it applies to your business.

1. Financial
This is very likely the most important objective of a social media campaign. Here are a few of the possible financial goals of the social media plan: Revenue – Leads - Building Email List – Referrals – Meetings

If you can track your social media campaign down to the lead form, you are golden. But when the traffic is being driven from your Facebook page it’s a little bit harder to point exactly to the ROI from your Facebook LIKES or “activity.” And if your sales cycle is a bit longer than your normal Google Analytics report, it might be harder to identify the customers who found you and purchased your goods or services because of one of your social media efforts.

2. Customer Support
By using Twitter and Facebook for customer communications many companies have made a healthy case for Social Media as part of your customer outreach program.

The the ROI formula is: ROI= (Gains-Costs)/Costs 
Why not do the maths for your situation?

3. Branding
The big companies are not trying to directly sell you something with their Social Media marketing campaigns, but they want you to think of them when you need something. So they are building brand awareness in your mind. If you do buy something from one of the big name players how are they going to measure their ROI?

By setting clear objectives and putting clear analytics and reporting together, a good strategist can set up your Social Media campaign for success. Social should be a part of every business objective, and I can show you how to achieve a solid ROI on your marketing efforts by including Social Media. 

Get a FREE 60 minute consultation with me using my contact form

 
 
Content collated & provided by @iftweeter 
Whether you're planning your tactical social media campaign or reengineering your business for the social consumer, social media research is invaluable in setting benchmarks. They help you manage expectations, isolate priorities and best of all, define KPIs that set the evaluation bar.

But there is a dearth of UK and European focused research resources. Apart from econsultancy's marvellous internet stats compendium, it can be quite difficult to find individual studies without scouring Google for days!

So to make it easy, below are 14 highlights of the latest social media research, with links to original studies. Better still, they are in 140 characters or less, and very tweetable, if you fancy sharing a few insights.

1. During 2011 there were 228 billion UK Internet visits to websites and 28 billion hours spent online
Source: Experian Hitwise Dec 2011 http://bit.ly/uMRrri
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2. 87% of UK businesses will invest more in social media in 2012
Source: Royal Bank Of Scotland (RBS), Dec 2011. Reported in The Scotsmanhttp://bit.ly/th7heE
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3. Almost 2/3 (64%) of companies say they are now beyond the experimental phase compared to 54% a year ago
Source: econsultancy Nov 2011 http://bit.ly/to9Je7
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4. Only 48% of UK companies use social media, compared to 72% in the US and 83% in China
Source: KPMG, May 2011 http://bit.ly/sD194p
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5. Only 6% of business owners are monitoring social media to better understand their customers
Source: Sage UK Dec 2011 http://bit.ly/w0hXfS
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6. 60% of organisations have not yet implemented internal social media training and governance models
Source: econsultancy Nov 2011 http://bit.ly/to9Je7
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7. 25% of marketers think social signals ‘very important’ for search rankings, 57% think it will be important in 3 years
Source: Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing Dec 2011 http://bit.ly/umrYAO
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8. 43% of UK women agreed they often find out about breaking stories via social networks; compared to 27% of men
Source: Ofcom Dec 2011 http://bit.ly/sIjKCm
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And on the media front….

9. MySpace slips out of top 10 of leading social networks in UK
Source: Metro http://bit.ly/rGT5Pa
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10. 60% of UK online population now use Facebook more than once a day
Source: YouGov Dec 2011 http://bit.ly/uAhCm3
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11. 71% with a social networking profile visit a networking sites at least once a day; 20% visit 5 times a day or more
Source: Ofcom Dec 2011 http://bit.ly/sIjKCm
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12. The Daily Mail and the Guardian websites are the most popular newspaper websites in Europe
Source: Ofcom Dec 2011 http://bit.ly/sIjKCm
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13. 2.6m people joined the top 20 Facebook retail pages in the last 6 months
Source: eDigitalResearch Dec 2011 http://bit.ly/uLhLwH
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And just because…

14. 47% of teenage smartphone users admitted using or answering their handset in the bathroom or toilet
Source: Ofcom Dec 2010 http://bit.ly/sbkdwd 
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Thanks to @iftweeter for doing the leg work

Guy Outram