You should first have a blog, and then track who is reading it. There are many good web analytics
packages that will track what the most popular content on your site is. You can probably also see
where those site visitors are coming from and how long they’re spending on your page. This infor-
mation will help you determine what blog entries are most successful and who is sending the most
traffic to your blog, so that you can capitalize on that.Next, you can monitor the number of visitors who are actually interacting with your content by
checking your guest book, forums, or comment capabilities. Guest books aren’t nearly as popular
as they once were, but if you’re participating in a social network and you don’t have forums or
comment capabilities on your blog, you’re missing a large part of the value of social media.Also pay attention to how often you’re added to social booking sites. Sites like del.icio.us and
StumbledUpon are a couple of the social bookmarking sites that can help boost your site traffic.
The easiest way to monitor your site in social bookmarking networks is to create an account with
them and then use the account to search for your URLs. In other words, who is actually adding
your site/article/blog posts to sites.Measure how many readers are actually subscribing to your RSS feeds. The number of subscribers
you have on your RSS feeds will be a good indicator of how well you’re doing in your SMO efforts.
The more subscribers you have, the more popular your site is.Another way to measure your success with social bookmarking is to watch who is linking to you.
If you have a good analytics program, it will probably provide you with a report that shows where
incoming links originated. If your analytics program doesn’t provide this information, you can figure
out who’s linking to you using that old standby, a web search. To find out who is linking to your site
use the following search string, replacing yourwebsitewith the actual URL of the pages you want to
track: link:http://www.yourwebsite.com.One last way to monitor your success in the social-media space is to monitor how many people
are connected to you. In MySpace and FaceBook, that might mean how many friends you have.
In LinkedIn, it would be how many colleagues you are connected to, and on Digg the measure-
ment you’re looking for is the number of times your content is tagged.All of these are indications that you’re being followed by someone. And the more people with whom
you can build a relationship, obviously the better your success will be. And that’s probably the most
important rule of all to remember about social-media networking and social-media optimization:
build the relationship first and the rest falls into place.256
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