Learn How to Improve Your ROI of Social Media

Understanding your website traffic is the first step in driving more traffic to your website. And analytics are the name of the game in 2012 social media. Gone are the days when social media marketing success can just happen without this kind of understanding.

originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.What's the ROI of social media? That's the million-dollar question that every marketer and brand manager would like to answer - and yet, we still can't do it.

First off, I want to preface this post with the fact that social media shouldn't be done only with the goal of making direct conversions. Social media is about building new relationships, generating word of mouth marketing, and strengthening brand loyalty with your customers.

Last week, we explained why social media Return on Investment (ROI) is a gray area. Again, social media is not a magic bullet. It takes time, energy, and creativity. Key ingredients to success include building new relationships and effectively integrating social media into your current marketing efforts.

Nick Cifuentes | January 27, 2012 | Comments In a recent column, I discussed the methodology around discovering ROI for corporate social media efforts. While this has yet to become an exact science, it's one of this year's most desired objectives for digital marketers.

Did you get a larger social media budget for 2011? Are you being pressured to deliver ROI from your new budget? As the buzz around social media finally made it to executive's ears their willingness to open the proverbial purse strings loosened, but it came at a price that many marketers were unprepared for ...

The goal of my recent post on the Yahoo! Web Analytics blog was to pull us up 10,000 feet to do something we do less than 1% of the time in the web analytics world - look at the bigger business picture. It was called: Secret To Winning With Web Analytics?

What follows is the entire version of my recent post on Mashable, "The Maturation of Social Media ROI" Over the years, Social Media experts attempted to redefine ROI for a new era of influence. While some introduced alternative philosophies for measuring the nuances tied to social media, others wondered aloud whether ROI simply wasn't necessary as the tools and methodologies for analyzing yields didn't yet exist.

By Sherilynn Macale, , 02:25am Remember a week or two ago when I told everyone to invite me to join your mafia in Crime City on Google+ Games because I just loved it so, so much? Yeah. Stop that.

Jamie Turner is the chief content officer of the 60 Second Marketer, the online magazine for BKV Digital and Direct Response. He is also the co-author of How to Make Money with Social Media . He'll be speaking about his Social Media ROI Cycle at the SXSW Conference in Austin on March 15.

ROI of Social Media: Myths, Truths and How to Measure Wondering if your social media initiative is providing value to your organization? Justifying the business case for social media is a BIG question. This ebook will take you through the dos and don'ts as well as the different measures to calculate true social media ROI.

Social media ROI has remained elusive for numerous marketers despite their best efforts to develop a calculation that will prove the business value of the allotted social media resources. Through a new feature in Google Analytics, some customization to your Google Analytics tracking, and diligent work on the part of your social media team, the ROI of your social media efforts can be discovered using Google Analytics.

Social media marketing can either be an extremely worthwhile investment for your business or a massive time sink that brings little or no benefit. Unfortunately, in the short term, telling those two extremes apart is not always easy. How much is a Twitter follower worth?

This is a guest post by Eugene Farber. "How do you measure the ROI of your social media efforts?" It's a question being discussed ad nauseum of late, and rightfully so. Social media investment is a legitimate issue that businesses have to face, now more than ever.