Integrating your social media activities with your existing online presence is important for several reasons. Your social media profiles can bring more traffic to your website and vice versa, it will make your website more interactive so visitors are more likely to engage with you, and it can help you to build more overall brand recognition on the internet.

In my last blog, Measuring Social Media ROI, I looked at how to determine the value of your social media activity. Following on from this, here are some best practices to keep in mind:

1. Define clear goals

You can’t evaluate the return on investment properly if you don’t know what it is you are trying to achieve.

2. Track KPIs overtime to determine trends

If you keep track of your key performance indicators each month you’ll soon see whether any trends are emerging and it will be easy to track them back to their point of origin.

According to an eMarketer report from November 2010 only about 14.7% of businesses actively measure their social media ROI. The majority of businesses put a lot of energy into launching and engaging in a variety of social media activity but not very much effort into measuring their effectiveness in actually producing a return on investment.

Part of the problem is that there really isn’t a standard process for measuring the ROI of social media, and there are those who believe it can’t be done. However there are ways of determining the value of your social media activity:

Social bookmarking has been around for a while now, but not everyone understands how to make the most of it. Here’s an overview as well as some tips on how to use it effectively for business.

What is social bookmarking?

Most people are used to bookmarking web pages on their browser to refer to later; social bookmarking takes this a step further by allowing you to save these pages to a public website. This means that not only can you access them from any computer, but you can also share them with your friends and connections. It’s a useful way to organise, store and manage your bookmarks and a great way to share yours and find other people’s bookmarks of resources online.

Crowdsourcing is basically the art of outsourcing business tasks to a community outside of you business, so it’s pretty much using ‘crowds’ to ‘source’ solutions to your problems.  There has been a trend towards crowdsourcing recently, mainly due to Web 2.0 technologies making it easy to do.  It allows you to leverage a wide pool of resources quickly and simply.

Crowdsourcing for business

More recently businesses have been more aware of the benefits that crowdsourcing can bring, here are some examples of how you can use it in your business:

In order to get the most benefit out of your social media marketing activities, it’s important to decide what your objectives are. These will depend on what you want to achieve with social media as well as how active you already are and how much of a following you have already built up.

With the London Marathon coming up on Sunday we all have marathon fever, so it seemed appropriate to learn some lessons from it in regard to social media too this week…

It seems that almost everyone is using social media marketing in their business these days, which is a good thing, but unfortunately there who have jumped on the bandwagon with little or no regard to social media etiquette. I’m afraid this blog post is a bit of a rant in this regard…

The BBC recently wrote an article outlining how social media and TV has become a part of everyday life. What this basically means is that whilst watching TV many people will also be partaking in social networking at the same time. The BBC states that “A recent study from marketing agency Digital Clarity found that 80% of under-25s used a second screen to communicate with friends while watching TV and 72% used Twitter, Facebook or a mobile app to comment on shows.”

A social media policy is a must have these days in order for businesses to outline how social media is to be used.  It will offer guidelines as to how to communicate with the public using social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter and YouTube.  Your social media policy should apply to all employees and should be effective whether they are at work or not.  There is nothing worse than having didgy office party photographs splattered all over Facebook, or find Twitter posts by members of staff slagging off the boss.