Showing posts with label social media tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media tools. Show all posts

Friday, September 12, 2014

7 Must Use Social Media Tools


7 Must Use Social Media Tools
Social media is a huge commitment, and if you’re like me you would welcome anything that increases the return on both your time and financial investment. The problem is, there are more social media tools than you can poke a stick at- all claiming to solve world hunger. So what tools actually deliver?
Today I am going to save you some time and let you in on the best social media tools for each category.

Social Media Management

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is my personal favourite and arguably the best social media tool on both cost efficiency and performance. Probably the biggest reason to use Hootsuite is the ability to schedule and push content to multiple social media accounts (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Linkedin) simultaneously all within one dashboard.
Hootsuite’s functionality doesn’t stop there. You can also measure campaign results using the custom inbuilt analytics, track conversations and delegate responses within your social media team. The only qualm I have about Hootsuite is it’s inability to preview images for twitter posts (they currentley only appear as collapsed links)

Social Media Tools

Pricing

Hootsuite offers a free version that provides more than enough functionality for beginners. For SME’s I would recommend at least Hootsuite Pro ($8.99 per month) and for marketing agencies, social media consultants and larger businesses I would recommended exploring the enterprise options.

Customer Service

2. Must Be Present

Must Be Present is my pick for the smart companies that have realised social media is more than just a marketing platform and can play a pivotal role as a customer service touch point.
The tool searches your Twitter account to find out how quickly you respond to mentions. It then uses engagement reports to compare your response rates with other users- giving you a snapshot on how you stack up. Monitoring response rates is crucial as studies have shown 42% of consumers expect a response in an hour and according to NM Incite, 71% of consumers are more likely to recommend a brand that provides a quick and effective response. Just like a call centre sets Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) for average hold times, I would recommend setting KPI’s for social media response times and Must Be Present is the perfect tool to track your success.
Social Media Tools

Pricing

FREE

Brand Reputation Management

3. Social Mentions

Not monitoring what’s being said about your brand on social media is like entering a boxing ring without a mouthguard- not a smart idea. Social Mentions built by Sprout Social is my pick for brand reputation management on a budget. The tool prides itself on going beyond Google alerts and finding almost anywhere your brand is mentioned online. You can monitor over 100 social media channels, including all the big boys- Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Youtube. There are also some basic analytics that allow you to measure brand sentiment, reach, strength and passion.
Social Media Tools

Pricing:

FREE

Content Creation

4. Trendspottr

A key strategy to expand the reach of your content marketing campaign is to jump on trending issues early, otherwise known as trend jacking. How do you anticipate a trend before it reaches mainstream awareness? Well that is where Trendspottre comes in. The tool mines Twitter and public Facebook data to reveal trends that will likely “go viral” over the next few hours or days allowing you to create powerful content that will snowball your brands reach. The social media tool also has the capacity to identify influencers in your industry who are on the rise, allowing you to reach out to them before your competition.
Social Media Tools

Pricing

The only problem with Trendspottre is that it comes at a cost, starting at $199 per month. If it fits in your marketing budget it is definitely worth the investment.

Twitter

5. Tweetpi
Twitter can be overwhelming to manage with its fast pace, but Tweetpi makes the job a whole lot easier allowing you to analyse the engagement and activity of your followers. Within the platform you can remove unfollowers, clean up dormant followers and reciprocate by following users who follow you. Tweetpi is the perfect tool for keeping your twitter account tidy and ensuring you are only engaging with relevant users.

Social Media Tools

Pricing

The entry level edition starts at $7.49 per month and has more than enough features to get the job done.

Facebook

6. Facebook Custom Audiences
I touched on the power of Custom Audiences in my post “3 super effective Facebook Advertising strategies“. If you’re advertising on Facebook, this tool is a must use. You can upload email lists from an excel file or directly from your mail chimp lists. You can also create audiences from Google+ circles, app users, Facebook Id’s and even website visitors which you can use to serve advertising too. Mastering this tool will no doubt increase the return on your Facebook advertising campaigns.
Social Media Tools

Pricing
FREE

Instagram

7. Iconosqaure
Iconosquare is like the Facebook insights of Instagram. The tool has a comprehensive analytics dashboard that allows you to view follower engagement, most engaging media, growth history, trending hashtags, average media life span, follower demographics and more. Just like Facebook Insights Iconosquare provides the perfect data to assess what content is and isn’t resonating with your target audience. You can then adjust your content marketing accordingly. You can also review unfollowers, people you follow who don’t follow you back and remove inactive followers- allowing you to keep your Instagram account tidy.


Social Media Tools

Pricing
The analytics function within Iconosquare is free but you can also run competitions and promote your Instagram account within the app at an additional charge.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

8 Creative Communications Tools That Help You Rock Social Media

8 Creative Communications Tools That Help You Rock Social Media image 8539048913 3328e8545c

Where to begin? There are thousands of cool and creative communications tools to monitor and optimize the function of social media sites. Many are simple tools that have only one function and are novel to play with, but don’t have a lot of practical applications. Other tools are like Swiss army knives that perform multiple functions.

Some of these tools are real time savers. They help you perform functions that would otherwise take hours. When you don’t have a social media team to help you keep up with posting, following and answering comments, much less blogging and other content marketing, you need all the time-savers you can get. These tools do just that.

Twitter has the most off-site tools because of its open API that allows collaborators to design programs to work with its content stream. It’s not unusual to see Twitter tools come and go as some catch on with users and others go by the wayside. We’ll take a look at a few of the most useful apps for social media we’ve found here.

8 Creative communications tools for social media you should know about:

1) Topsy: Topsy is to social media what Google is to the web. It’s a free search engine for all social media. It allows you to search topics in general to see what content is being shared, or you can break that down by links, tweets, photos, videos and influencers. In addition, you can view a chart that analyzes a comparison of up to three terms trending over a month, and there’s another page to track social trends.

2) Followerwonk: Followerwonk is a sophisticated Twitter tool that analyzes, tracks and sorts your Twitter followers. You can sort your followers according to whatever criteria you decide, and it allows you to weed out dormant followers. You can find your most influential followers and analyze those they follow; compare your social graph to competitors, friends or industry leaders; and search all Twitter profiles to locate profiles you want to follow, whether it’s new talent, customers, or just friends.

3) ManageFlitter: This app is another that helps you sort and manage your Twitter followers, track who unfollowed you, helps you manage multiple Twitter accounts and track keyword mentions.

4) Twixonomy: This tool allows you to analyze your competitor or anyone else on Twitter. You can see the type of content they send and how it performs so that you can emulate their content for your own distribution, check out your competitor’s followers/friends so that you can engage with them; and identify the hashtags your competitors use so that you can monitor their content.

5) PicMonkey: PicMonkey is a free online photo editor that allows you to add text to your pictures for sharing on social media. It also allows you to create a photo collage. There are apps and extensions for Facebook and Chrome.

6) Tagboard: With Tagboard, you can research topics across all social media platforms based on hashtags.

7) Nestivity: You’re probably familiar with TweetChats. Well, Nestivity offers TweetCasts, which are TweetChats on steroids. With this site, you can share rich media, conduct presentations, stream live video and showcase your products using the social amplification of Twitter, all in the same chat.

8) Brook: With this app, you can subscribe to get the five best tweets from the people you select. It’s a way to cut down on the ubiquitous Twitter “noise.”

These are just a handful of the creative communications tools available to help you manage and get more value from your social media.




Friday, February 7, 2014

4 Social Media Tools to Grow Your Startup

sprout_mention_googleanalytics_feedly


When you run a startup, the last thing you have is time. Social media is now necessary to build one’s brand — and unfortunately, it takes a ton of time to cultivate and maintain.
Luckily, there are a myriad of social media tools created to help you save time and accomplish your goals. Since there are so many, it might be hard for you to gauge which ones work the best for their value.
This list gives you some of the top must-have social media tools for growing your startup.
1. Feedly (Free)
If your social media brands are all about curating and sharing outside content, it can be tough to keep track of all the websites you visit. You may even have a list of all the sites you have to go through each day. On top of that, you still have to individually visit each one and scroll through a bunch of unrelated articles until you find one that’s relevant.
That’s where Feedly comes in. It’s a free tool that gathers RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds from your favorite websites and presents them in extremely easy-to-navigate lists. You can divide up the websites into different categories for easy searching, and even share articles directly from the app, as well as save articles to post a later date.
And if you’re worried about still having to scroll through a bunch of unrelated content before finding anything relevant on multi-category sites, Feedly allows you to look only at articles in specific sub-categories of a website.
2. Mention ($6.99 – $6,499/month)
Regardless of the size of your business, someone somewhere is bound to be talking about it. It’s important that you monitor what people are saying about your brand so you can engage with them, as well as identify your brand’s strengths, weaknesses, and reach. But how can you keep track of every little time someone drops the name of your company online?
Say hello to Mention! The tool is arguably the best for alerting you when someone on the social web is talking about your company. Regardless of whether they mentioned or included you in a hashtag, all you have to do is give Mention keywords to track and and it crawls every social network to alert you the second your keywords get published — by anyone in the world.
3. Sprout Social ($39-$99/month)
If your business is serious about maintaining their social presence, it’s likely you have multiple accounts on different platforms. It can be incredibly time-consuming to go through each site and post a unique status for each one, and it can be even more challenging to consistently check on posts to see how they’re performing.
Sprout Social is a social tool that allows businesses to oversee multiple social profiles, all in one place. The app lets you publish content to every major social platform — and most importantly, lets you schedule each and every post. This allows you to curate a bunch of content and schedule posts a whole day, week, or even month ahead of time. Scheduling also lets you post at peak engagement times without having to stop whatever you were currently doing to post your status.
And what about checking performance? Sprout Social has a very detailed analytics system that gives you weekly or monthly performance reports. These reports are incredibly easy to understand and process, yet still include vital information that help you make important research-based decisions.
4. Google Analytics (Free, if your site generates 10M or fewer hits/month)
Last, but not least, is the analytical powerhouse that is Google Analytics. It’s arguably the best tool to track not only social media stats, but also blog, website, and digital advertising stats. If you don’t use this already, get it now.
Analytics is able to track every social media post and tell you everything you need to know about it — including how many people clicked on the link, their demographics, the duration of time they stayed on the website, the amount of revenue you’ve made from clicked posts (if you’re promoting a sale/product), and an unbelievable amount more.
The analytics that Google gives you for social media are critical if your company is serious about establishing a social strategy, because you can see exactly who’s engaging with your brand and focus your efforts on targeting them.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

5 free tools to power up your social media influence

As the name implies, this service focuses on Twitter, and it does a great job of providing plenty of useful stats. You'll see how many times on average you tweet a day, what days and what times of the week you tweet, how many retweets, user mentions, and so on, you get, the people who most retweet you, and plenty more. Also useful is that you see the most influential people in your Twitter network, so you can make sure to pay special attention to them in order to expand your reach.
Klout measures your overall social media reach, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Foursquare. It gives you an overall number for your influence, graphs how it changes over time, shows who's been mentioning you and plenty more.
This very good tool, for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, offers an exceptional amount of very useful information, including your overall activity, your "amplification" (how many retweets you get per hundred tweets), the growth of your follower base, your most popular content, and much more. Particularly useful is its analysis of your followers, showing their geographic location, interests, and type (celebrity, power user, casual user, or novice). It will also tell you who are the most influential people by categories of interest, so that you can try to befriend them in order to grow your influence.
This one examines your presence on a variety of social networks inglucing Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora and Twitter, shows you the topics in which you have influence, who you influence, and who influences you. Use what you find here to target the topics you talk about, and find out about top influencers.
This Twitter tool is very good for identifying the highest-value members of your network (those who can best expand yoru reach). But it goes beyond that, by recommending followers to whom you should consider replying in order to foster better relationships, those you should consider following, and more.

Saturday, October 12, 2013

25 Social Media Tools Your Brand Should Be Using [Infographic]

Using social media for promotion, interaction and engaging is a tough endeavor if you don’t know how to analyze the results. It doesn’t really matter if you’re an individual or a brand, if you’re looking to progress, you need to know the result of your efforts. That’s where all the social media toolscome in handy. These software trackers are magnificent applications to use when you want to make sense of all your social media efforts.
Finding the right social media tools to track your effort can be like trying to squeeze yourself through the thickest jungle. There are tons and tons of applications out there, and they all claim to be the best. That may very well be true, but only for certain features and functions. Each service or software has its own set of social media tools, and you will have to look long and hard in order to find the best ones suited for you.
In order to help you tread this jungle, I decided to head on out and find something that might just help you a little bit. What I found was a useful infographic called 25 Awesome Social Media ToolsYour Brand Should Be Using presented by the Social Media Strategies Summit. It has a whole truck load of services that would be beneficial to the success of your brand.
This social media tools infographic is divided up in 5 categories: Social Listening, Social Conversation, Social Marketing, Social Analytics and Social Influencer. In each category, there are 5 different applications or services that could impact your brand’s success heavily. All you need to do is pick the one that you think is best suited for your brand and needs. It’s when you start looking at the result of your social media efforts with the help of social media tools like these that you can really make changes that will progress your brand upwards instead of sideways.
Remember that not every app works for everyone. Sometimes you have to couple these apps differently in order to make them work for you instead of against you. The age of the bots is pretty much over. That worked for a while, and people reaped great rewards from it, but today it’s all about being unique, real, transparent and engaging. If you can apply those 4 things to your social media efforts, you are destined for success.

Social Media Tools To Monitor Your Brand

(Click Infographic To Enlarge)

25 Social Media Tools Infographic



Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Using Social Media To Boost SEO

Google’s Penguin algorithm update was designed to allow the Google search engine to tell good websites apart from poor quality ones.

Whether your website has been affected by the Penguin and Panda updates or not, you need to stay alert to the general direction that Google is taking with these updates. Google uses these updates to help promote only good, useful websites on its search results. If you don’t respond to these new efforts by Google, you could well find your search engine ranking yanked out from under you on a future update.

How the social media figure in your efforts to rank well

While Google cannot actually understand the content on a website to know if it is valuable, it can turn to the general public for a few clues. When human visitors on a website approve of what they see, they are likely to talk about their experience on the social media. Checking out a page’s social media activity, then, is a valuable way by which Google can tell if a website is really popular.

Going forward, social signals are likely to grow in their importance to Google’s ranking algorithm. Businesses need to try their best to gather a following of people who talk about them on the social networks. It may not even be enough to do this on Facebook. Gathering a following on Google’s own Google+ social network will be important to ranking on Google in the future. Google, after all, has better access to content on Google+ than content on Facebook.

Building a following on the social networks

Many business websites try to game Google by buying fake Facebook Likes and building fake Facebook pages that they can get to follow their websites. While these moves might net you a reasonable search ranking for some time, you never know when the next Google or Facebook algorithm update will find you out.

It would be a far better way to simply start with a quality content marketing plan and publish good content that draws genuine interest. When you get a genuine following behind your website, you can earn your social visibility on Google the safe and natural way.

Publishing good content isn’t as difficult as it sounds. Often, the social networks themselves offer great clues on what to write about.

  • Look at the comments to your blog posts and social media posts. Often, these comments are about the questions that readers have. Answering these questions can be a great way to finding interesting ideas to write about.

  • Check out social media pages to do with your general industry. You are likely to come across a number of instances where people ask questions. If you are in the landscaping business, for instance, you can find plenty of questions by people about what time is best to plant a lawn, to prune trees, and so on. If you are in the interior design business, you will see people asking questions about how to make hardwood floors less slippery and how to make a large room look cozy, among other things.

Using the social networks to build backlinks

You need to market your blog to your social following. You can do this by placing links on your social networking accounts for each new blog post that you publish. You can make use of automated tools to do this. These tools can repeatedly announce new blog posts on your social networking accounts to get people’s attention. The more people read your new blog posts, the more likely you are to get backlinks and improve your search rankings.

It is best to not completely rely on the search engines

Google’s algorithm updates aren’t precise. They cause considerable collateral damage. Legitimate websites often see their search engine rankings fall when Google releases an update. Every business should try to reduce its reliance on natural search engine visibility for this reason. A strong social media presence can be a good way to achieve this. When you have a dependable following on the social media, you can rely on your visibility on those media even if the search engines don’t support you.

Trying your best to build yourself up as an authority in your niche is a good way to gain visibility on the social media. When you publish regular posts that prove you an authority in your field, you become the primary resource to head for when people need the kind of information you provide. This kind of reputation is what helps websites survive fickle search engine algorithms.

Friday, August 16, 2013

Choosing Social Media Tools

After the big bang of social media came the big bang of social media tools. The market place has never been busier and to complicate things there is a boom in acquisitions and mergers among platform and network providers.
Only a few years ago social media tools were simple, mostly free of charge and you could count them on one hand.
Now there seems to be a new one every week, prices are going up and propositions overlap. Driven by demand and raised expectations, tool providers are under pressure to create a one-stop shop. The uber tool!
That can make choosing social media tools chaotic, confusing and occasionally, very stressful. Here are some top tips we've put together to help you.
 Requirement gathering
What are you trying to achieve? What objectives are you trying to meet?
These are the most important questions you must ask yourself. And they must be considered first. Quarantine your actual needs from any preferences you might have. It's easy to be swayed by familiarity or convenience. A little cold discipline goes a long way. 

Gap analysis

What existing social media tools are you using and where are they falling short?
Sometimes the existing tool might still be the best choice. Perhaps it could be used better and some exploration will reveal more benefits. Look for free training options and check with your supplier. Don't forget user forums. They're another source of real world problems and solutions, and most importantly free advice.
Perhaps there are additional features in your social media tools that could be unlocked by upgrading or extending it. Tools are increasingly extensible through third party add-ons or plug-ins. You might find that the answer lies in connecting a free widget or integating your existing tools more closely.

MSCW prioritisation

So you've established your requirements and checked your existing options. Once it's clear that you need a new tool then prioritising your needs is the next step. This is crucial because it compels you to choose what is really most important to you.
Assign the following values to each of your requirements:
1. Must Have
2. Should Have
3. Could Have
4. Won't Have
You're looking to create clarity so don't be afraid to wield the knife. Is that requirement really a 'Must Have' or is it optional? Make a clear distinction between 'Should Have' and 'Could Have'. 'Should Have' is an established need but not an absolute pre-requisite. 'Could Have' is a flexible option you could do without if necessary.
The Won't Have value is sometimes overlooked but I can't stress how useful it can be. Positively listing precisely what you are not looking for is as important in choosing a useful social  media tool as defining what you do require. It's easier to identify unnecessary features you might end up paying for if you actually set out what you don't need.

Card sorting and folksonomy

MSCW prioritisation may be too simplistic for your needs. With more abstract or complex requirements card sorting can be helpful for classification. Write down your requirements on some plain old-fashioned cards. Then get users of your social media tools to group these cards by type.
If your needs cover engagement, monitoring and simple moderation then ordering requirements into these groups will help. If your needs are particularly bespoke, you could create your own folksonomy (a shared vocabulary) and then tag your needs. This should help bring order to diverse, obscure or unique requirements. 

Costs and pricing of social media tools

It's not just tools that are proliferating, so is pricing. One particular pricing model is reaching ubiquity: freemium. The freemium model has been around since the 1980s. It refers to a pricing model where basic functionality or access is free but more advanced features are priced at a premium. And that's where costs can get hard to predict.
Client Access Licenses (per user or per device) are giving way to more elastic pricing points. Pricing points that are based on usage of data or units of time are more subject to demand. And often more flexible because of it. The idea that you only pay for what you use should make pricing more transparent. But it can also make it less obvious what you will pay.
This is why it's important to try before you buy, where you can. A 30-day trial is not just your opportunity to assess a new social media tool. It's also a chance to understand what volume of usage you might expect. Increasingly suppliers offer enterprise clients an assessment to forecast volumes and therefore costs. 

Use a scoring system

I grade the social media tools that I use. My tool grading app splits requirements into sections, with items receiving a star rating. For example Platform Management Capabilities rates features such as work flow, scheduling and notifications. While the Properties Covered section looks at which social media platforms and channels can be managed. This way I get an overall score for a tool or a score for a particular area, so I know what will work for my clients.
Procurement teams often use a scoring system for software selection. And procurement departments are becoming more involved in the selection of social media tools. If your business has a procurement team they are always a good place to start. You might have to go through them anyway!

(via)

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

7 Traits of Successful Social Media Marketers and Tools to Help

The following outlines 7 traits of successful social media marketers with some tools to help you achieve similar success.

1. You Create Excellent Content Consistently

 You have the expertise in your business so it’s really important to create content to demonstrate this expertise and build up trust with your audience.  But you need to create this content consistently.  Success with content does not happen overnight.
BetaOut
Betaout is an editorial project management software.  It can be used by an individual or a team and it allows you to schedule, plan and manage your content creation.  You get great functionality for free for up to 3 users which is fantastic.
An editorial calendar is essential if you are creating content, as it lets you collate all your ideas into one place and plan out your content for you and/or your team.  You will become more consistent with the delivery of this content using this type of software.
This is the ideas room where you enter any ideas you have for any blog posts
This is the ideas room where you enter any ideas you have for any blog posts

With Betaout you can write down your ideas, create your calendar and even write the content directly within Betaout.  If you work as part of a team you can assign your content to someone in the team to review.
PostPlanner
Postplanner is a Facebook tool that allows you to plan, schedule and find content for sharing on Facebook.  Since using PostPlanner I have delivered content a lot more consistently on Facebook.

Postplanner is a great tool for sharing content on Facebook
Postplanner is a great tool for sharing content on Facebook

  1. Schedule out content, at the times most suitable for your fans.
  2. Select content to share from sources that you trust
  3. Find content that is trending related to your business
  4. Add in new trusted sources of content

2. You are a curator

A curator is someone that finds great content from other people and shares it out to their network.   It’s not about sharing content, it’s about sharing fantastic content that is relevant to your audience.
To be an effective curator you need some tools that will help you discover this content.
Scoop.it
On Scoop.it you can follow “boards” which is a collection of content that other people found.  As you get to know people on Scoop.it you can follow boards from people you trust that track content relevant to your business and this can be a great way of finding new and interesting content.

As you get to know people on Scoop.It you will find people that share good content that is relevant to your audience.  This is a great time saver!
As you get to know people on Scoop.It you will find people that share good content that is relevant to your audience. This is a great time saver!

3.  You Build a Large Audience

When you first start growing your social media presence, it takes time to get your name known and grow your following but over time you gather momentum.
If we take your website as an example, you need to ensure you focus on the right tactics to capture the details of your website visitors.  On their first visit they may not convert as a customer immediately but you need to provide a stepping stone.
Typically this stepping stone is converting your visitors to email subscribers and then over time some of these will become customers.
Of course we have a couple of tools to help.
AWeber
AWeber is an email marketing tool which helps you manage your email subscribers.  You put customized forms on your website so that any email subscribers go directly into your email database.  Through AWeber you can check your conversion rate which is the number of visitors to your site versus the number of subscribers.

AWeber allows you to measure conversion rates from different parts of your website
AWeber allows you to measure conversion rates from different parts of your website
Lead Converter
Popups that appear when you are browsing a website can be quite annoying, but they can still achieve good conversion rates.   Lead Converter integrates with AWeber and provides you with a variety of options to encourage your visitor to convert.  For example, you can display a popup when someone visits a certain page on your website or display a bar across the top of your screen.  What’s great about Lead Converter is that you can then test which option works best, display variations of the same popup and much more.
The following is an example of a popup. If you wanted to test this out you could have multiple variations and see which one gets the higher conversion.

Popup box that can appear after a certain time period when a visitor is on your site
Popup box that can appear after a certain time period when a visitor is on your site

4.  You Manage Your Reputation

Your online reputation is really important so it’s vital to track what people are saying about you or your business.
One of the best tools for tracking what people say about you is Mention.  You can set up a variety of keywords and it will track mentions of these keywords across the web, Facebook, blogs, Twitter, and more.
The app is available on both the phone and desktop.
You can track when your company name is mentioned and filter this by channel.  In the example above this is filtered to show mentions through websites
You can track when your company name is mentioned and filter this by channel. In the example above this is filtered to show mentions through websites

5.  You Monitor Results

Analytics are an extremely important part of social media marketing.  You need to check what is and isn’t working and then take corrective action where required.  Everybody has a different audience, different content, different behaviors of visitors so there’s no one size that fits all.  That’s why monitoring results is vital.
Google Analytics is a free tool and certainly well worth setting up.  You can track social media traffic in Google Analytics to see what benefit you are getting from it.
This shows the e-mail conversion rate is higher from LinkedIn compared to Facebook
This shows the e-mail conversion rate is higher from LinkedIn compared to Facebook

If you want to compare the performance of your Facebook page with your competitors try out Agorapulse Barometer.
AgoraPulse-Barometer
Agorapulse lets you compare your Facebook page against other companies that have tested their page
If you want to do some research on your industry related to Twitter, Facebook. YouTube, etc., then it’s worth checking out Social Bakers.

 6.  You Test, Test, Test

If you don’t succeed try again!  When you do get that valuable traffic from Social Media you man not get that e-mail subscriber or sale you are looking for so we need to work on improving conversion.
There are various tools you can use to test what’s working and what’s not. Within Google Analytics there is a tool called Google Experiments.  This allows you to test different variations of pages on your website.
For example, using Google experiments we have a small difference in our home page on RazorSocial.  In the first version the testimonial from Mark Schaefer is on the left and in the second one it’s on the right.

You can have multiple versions of pages running to test which works best
You can have multiple versions of pages running to test which works best

Unbounce  is also a very good tool for creating test landing pages without any IT skill needed, that is also worth checking out.

7.  You don’t give up !!!

This is using the most important tool that you have which is your brain!  When you advertise you can get immediate results but it’s costly.  With Social Media Marketing you spend more time than money and you don’t generally get immediate results.  But if you build a real community of loyal followers you get ongoing results.