Five Things Most Social Media Marketers Forget (and shouldn’t!)

1.Tracking conversions accuratelyMost social media marketers don’t measure the ROI of their efforts. In fact, Jeremiah Owyang’s recent report indicates that 66% of marketers rely on engagement metrics rather than revenue metrics to measure performance. From our conversations, we’ve found that even those of you who do measure ROI use web analytics tools that under-attribute social. 2011 will be the year when the industry finally figures out how to get social media ROI right–don’t be left behind.

2. Using unique short URLs
Let’s say you use TweetDeck and bit.ly for most of your social media engagement. You have a link you want to post to two Twitter accounts and a Facebook page, and you want to follow up the initial post two days later. You create your short URL, send the initial updates and set yourself a reminder to post something in two days.

The problem with this scenario, again, is measurement. In this scenario, you have no way of knowing which posts generated the traffic since they all use the same short URL. You don’t know whether the traffic came from Facebook or Twitter, and you don’t know whether it came from your initial or follow-up posts. It’s hard to improve your marketing if you don’t know what’s working and what’s not.

3. Using web analytics campaign tracking
The problem is simple: if you don’t use campaign tracking in your short URL destination, your web analytics tool will classify most clicks as “direct”, which makes it harder to measure social activity on your website. Strangely, most social media marketers don’t take the time to do this. When asked why, it turns out the problem is an organizational one.

Apparently at big companies, people in different departments don’t talk to each other much. I know, we were surprised too, but turns out it’s true. If the head of web analytics and the head of social media marketing don’t happen to be buddy-buddy, often times the social media team isn’t even aware of the problem they’re creating when they don’t use campaign tracking. So consider yourselves informed. Now start adding those URL parameters.

4. Using custom short URLs
You would never host your company’s website on a third-party domain, and short URLs are no different. Custom short URLs reinforce your company brand and build trust with your audience. It’s dead easy to create your own short URL, and doesn’t have to cost more than $8. Why aren’t you doing this already?

5. Keeping a history
How many times have you heard the “stream” metaphor? Well, it’s true, dammit. Social media is a stream, and one of the biggest downsides to this is that information isn’t permanent. Any of you who have ever gone back to look for a positive customer comment or find a particularly relevant link realize this. Twitter search history is fairly short, and finding an old comment on your popular fan page is nearly impossible.