Social Media Metrics

The book I read to research this post was Social Media Metrics For Dummies by Leslie Poston which is a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

This book is about if you have a website or blog using online tools to measure things like the number of visitors and what pages they looked at and then using this information for marketing purposes. It also includes things like any social networks pages you may have and I think is primarily aimed at small businesses. The most famous web analytical tool is google analytics which is covered in quite a lot of depth and while the basic version is free there is a premium version for big businesses priced at $150,000 per year. Radian 6 is another product aimed at big businesses while many smaller concerns can probably settle for a free product like mint not to be confused with the finance site. The website for mint analytics is http://haveamint.com

There is of course also services like facebook insights which give you data concerning your product page and most social networks have something similiar. Sites like twitter let you advertise your account for more followers or promote a hash tag both of which are paid services. Twitter apparently has been charging quite a lot for these services and are in the process of introducing cheaper services along the lines of google adsense to make them more competitive. I assume it will be like pay per click rather than a flat rate. I really enjoyed reading this book and it has a lot of useful information.