This week I was chatting with a fellow small business owner about social marketing if small business owners are really benefitting from their social marketing endeavors.
As a Virtual Assistant, I must admit that I was late to implement to social marketing in my VA practice.
I could not for the life of me see what benefit could be derived from using Twitter or having a Facebook page and put it all down to a major time waster.
Then I started using social media, became intrigued with it, took a certification course in it and am now actually offer the service! I don't know about you but personally, I have found that measuring the results of social media initiatives for small businesses can be challenging and that the techniques that work for big firms are not really applicable to virtual assistants and other small businesses and solo-professionals.
Big companies have the manpower as well as the resources to allocate to the investigation of their social media participation.
The virtual assistant and entrepreneur generally do not.
For the small business owner and solo-professional trying to figure if the time being spent on marketing via social media is netting a return, there are a couple things you can do to determine if your time spent on Facebook, Twitter and your other favorite social media haunts is benefitting your business.
Firstly, you will need to determine how much time you devote to your social media involvement if you are to get a true sense of the value this time spent is bringing to you.
One tip would be to write down how much time you spent on a particular site.
Secondly, you will need to determine where your new leads are coming from so it's necessary to ask each and every new lead how they discovered you.
If the lead is coming through one of the social media channels you use, ask them which one.
Overtime, you may find that some sites are bringing you more benefit than others, and you may opt to focus your attention on those instead.
Once, they've given you the specifics as to where they found you, be sure to make a note of that as well.
Remember, it is critical that you ask each new lead how they found out about you because without doing this, it will be difficult to determine if your social media endeavors are benefitting you.
Tools such as Google Analytics and TweetMeme analytics are also great and can help shed you some light as well.
By comparing the overall time spent as well as the source of new leads you should be able to get a pretty accurate picture on how you are performing.