Posted by:  Patty Cisco, Creative Catalyst  July 14, 2010

Regardless of what form of social media that you may be using, the first rule of social networking applies: building a social networking audience takes time.  While you can clearly speed up the connection process with savvy social network marketing to leverage your existing customer base, building awareness and connection requires patience.  I was reminded of this recently when talking with a senior care marketer who had been using social media for a few months.  They said that they were being “monitored” to determine the effectiveness of social media and they were a little nervous because they weren’t seeing any results yet.

The good news is that the math of social networking is exponential and rapid once the connection process starts.  You may be surprised and perhaps a little overwhelmed at the success despite your planning.  The goal of measuring your strategy is to recognize the small signs of successes that lead to even larger wins for your organization.  In fact I was recently with a client who implemented a full social media strategy and I was surprised at some of the tools that are available that they were not using to measure their results.

Social Medial Tools for Your Tool Box
Several tools, each with a different purpose, worth becoming familiar with to enhance your social media efforts include:

·    www.socialmention.com Proves a powerful measurement tool for lots of social networking channels.
·    www.technorati.com Provides a running list and updated statistics on the top blogs and articles.  When creating tags for your blog, consider referring to a list such as this to get a sense of what people search for to help create tags that are more likely to get searched.
·    www.alexa.com Provides an overview of your social networking efforts.  Statistics for the site include traffic rank, page reach, page views, page views/user, bounce percentage, time on site, and search percentage for the site.  You can even compare competitor sites and statistics.
·    www.Delicious.com Allows you to track how many people have bookmarked your social networking site.

Also, if your social networking system has a polling system, this is another great tool to ask users and members directly about your system.  Such questions as:

·    What do you like about our social networking system?
·    What could be improved in our system?
·    Do you recommend the system to others?

This feedback can be invaluable to help you improve your social networking.

Social networking success does not occur overnight.  Organizations that track a number of measurements in multiple ways and use these to increase penetration of users in other social networking channels will have the greatest chance for sustained growth with their social networking systems.  The longer senior care marketers wait to get on the social networking band wagon the harder it will be to find you!

Not sure how to get started?  Call CISCO & CO today for assistance with social media strategy development, implementation, and management specifically for senior care organizations.

What other social media tools have you found helpful in achieving success with your social media??