Social media has never been at the forefront of Simply Clicks’ activities. In recent weeks this has changed. Two weeks ago we added the rel=author tag to our blogs in order to exploit the more prominent role played by Google+ in the search engine results pages. The second has been the mass of interest presented by the Facebook IPO.
We believe we have an acute understanding of the role played by social media in the marketing by virtue of our grasp and monitoring of web analytics. Recently, however, we have been involved in two social media workshop activities. The first activity was to create a social media workshop for the local chamber of commerce. The second and most recent activity was the delivery of an in-house social media workshop. The latter workshop was a highly valuable exercise as it gave me a direct insight into how a business in a competitive market category was struggling to come to terms with how social media was currently practised. The conclusion I drew from this experience was the need to create a search marketing and social media management service. In essence, based on my own analyses (see next paragraph), social media as a standalone discipline rarely generates a meaningful return. It is only when when social media is integrated with branding and organic and paid search that it achieves its full potential.
Data relating to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn crops up from time to time within our web analytics. Prior to the most recent social media workshop I analysed individual websites and aggregates of certain categories such B2B and e-commerce websites. I found that average bounce rates tended to be higher and levels of engagement and conversion much lower. Unlike when assessing the value of paid or organic search, working out the return on investment of these activities was difficult. Paid search has a Google Adwords budget and organic search has SEO expenditure. But most social media activity is carried out in-house and uses staff time rather than budgets. In observing and analysing this activity I came up with my own measure or metric which I called return on total effort. In order to maximise the return from this total effort, I propose that integrating search and social provides the way forward.
