Traffic from Social media optimization can be tracked

1. Google Analytics Referral Traffic

2. Number of Friends who have added you in their friends list in each of your profile in each Social Networks.

3. Frequency of updates and quality of content posted.

4. Number of votes on your content and number of people who regularly vote on your content.

5. The Amount of content in each of your profile pages and community knowledge sharing page.

6. The Total Number of Links to and from these profile pages.

7. Number of comments and frequency. How many of them are not in your friends list.

The amount of effort that is needed to market on social networks is tracked

A Facebook or an Orkut application is like an small widget which is used by the Users of social network. Since this application interacts with lot of people, it also has the ability to interact with the external server. Google Analytics for applications can be embedded into the application giving all data w.r.t the users using the application. Developers will also get an idea about the extent to which the application was spammed by users.

Developer Analytics (http://www.developeranalytics.com/analytics.php) and http://adonomics.com/ are service which is offered to developers of application to keep in touch with the traffic, demographic data, visitor data and conversion data.

These analytical tools in combination with customized tracking which you can set at application level which can send data to external server allows developers to track a lot of information about the user profiles and get useful information such as Traffic, Demographic Data, Profile Data etc.

This data has to be used to remodel and remake applications on Social Networks to make it more useful for users and make it more spam proof. A successful application can be built overtime by building more features to app based on the data, response derived from it.

Google gives details about creating a App;

http://www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets/about/developer.html

There are 3 phases for Gadget promotion:

Create: Develop a gadget based on idea. Hire a developer for this or try out yourself. Thinking of an successful idea is Gold, however it happens by chance. Make sure it works on all kind of sites and all Browsers including remote ones like Safari.

Promote: This is the easiest and lest effort part, just add these in various webpages, sites. Give options to Add to iGoogle, My Yahoo etc.

Track and Optimize: This requires analytics and time. You must use Log file analysis tracking for analyzing the performance of visitor data, traffic data, demographic data, user quality data. Etc. For example your gadget is running on Orkut and Facebook. The number of users in facebook may be more than Orkut, but traffic from Facebook may not be of much use to your business. Then you must customize you App to favour more Orkut community users based on quality of profiles on Orkut. A popular web app can have an impact on Reputation Management and Brand on social networks apart from monetizable traffic.

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The Long tail for Traffic Sources can be explained as:

A) Numerous Sources each generating smaller amount of targeted traffic.

B) Cumulatively form a significant percentage of overall traffic.

Advantage of Long tail traffic sources

A) Never be completely dependent on few sources of traffic. Never put all eggs in one basket.

B) Mitigate the risk due to competition & market dynamics.

C) Find New segment of target audience.

a. Forums, Social Networks, New Media formats also attract good amount of targeted traffic.
93% of IT professionals in US find social network helpful for professional solutions.

b. 60% of facebook users login daily.

c. It Industry spends more time in Social Media

How to develop a long tail of traffic sources

A) Optimize sites to support all types of users, media formats (Video, Images, Audio).

B) Do not ignore the needs of even a small percentage of users on your site.

C) Include features in your site for every new type of users as well. For example: Video/Audio/Image content users,

Why the effort?

A) People are increasingly using social media sites like del.icio.us, digg, facebook, answers etc.

B) Support your users to use your product on every social site.

B) Competition on newer traffic sources is less, so it is better to make the first move.

C) It is important to increase the length of the long tail.

D) It is also important to increase the width of the long tail.

D) Develop applications to like Blog, gadget, Facebook application, podcast subscription.

Using the Face Book example, which has more than 230% growth even in countries like India:

A) The idea behind making the site Open to developers was to increase the long tail of traffic.

B) Facebook now supports all type of users & all needs of users.

C) Even the need of small percentage of users to share Books is met by a Book application, which notifies people of best books and rates them. Face book car pool application, Face book Linkedin Application

D) Each application on facebook could have been a new profitable online business altogether.

E) Facebook’s is a collection of multiple brilliant ideas put in one single site. This has exploded the website, traffic, activity and popularity & brand value.

F) Every small & medium business can cash in traffic on Facebook by creating an innovative application for users. By giving freedom to external developers it has allowed them to create products for Facebook. These products meet the needs of even the smallest percentage of users on the site.

G) This is the biggest USP of facebook: satisfying the remote need of the smallest percentage of users with products developed by external developers who in turn get their brand promoted.

Overall Facebook wins by ensuring the long tail grows longer and wider.

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The core values for such websites are:
A) The focal point of the website is the user generated content and the user himself.
B) Quality of users/user generated content is the quality of the website
C) Users/Moderators can make or break your website
B) Use Product cleverly as a tool to attract right people to use the site and increase activity.

Types of Social Networks & Online Communities.
A) Forums
B) Groups
C) Book Marking Sites
D) Content Popularity Sites (Digg, etc)
E) Answers
F) Social Networking
G) Professional Networking
H) Specialty Search Engines (video, Photos) Like Youtube, Flickr.com

Traffic to Social Media Sites

A) Organic Traffic

B) Word of Mouth Marketing
i) Blogs
ii) Marketing on Other Social Network Sites (Facebook)
iii)Viral
iv)Link Baiting

C) Targeted PPC advertising (very small scale)

D) Product Offerings: This is basically generating gadgets, applications which can be used in external sites and help drive traffic to your website.

Traffic From Social Media Sites

It is true that you can receive huge amount of targeted traffic for Free from Social Networks, this is possible only if you can spend lot of time and effort in each of the social network.

It is important to build reputation on your profile in these sites to drive targeted traffic.

If your business receives good amount of traffic from other social network sites then you must be aware that traffic flow is not consistent over a period of time. There will be spikes in traffic graph from social network sites.

Social Media Marketing

Social Network is a place where users posts content (textual, video, other) about various topics under predefined categories. There is generally a moderator or an algorithm, which monitors activities and gives prominence to few stories/user generated content. Moderator also starts discussion or edits the thread on any topic.

A) Content is clearly divided into Communities, Categories or Tags

B) Tagging is very essential. Location & Keyword tagging are 2 main important tags

C) All pages to have static urls as the content posted by users can rank in Organic results.

D) The Title, Category Heading, Breadcrum trail, Number of Views of the content, Content Url and links in the content post are essential for organic ranking.

E) If right content is not getting exposure the moderator has to work to ensure they get maximum views. Bring them on Home Page or link from relevant other pages.

F) The features and tools must be designed to get right content on Top of user attention.

G) To know the value of social media site,

i) Find the top number of views for any content or category.
ii) Find the number of users on each category at any point of time
iii) What is the average posts per user on each category
iv) Find the top 20% of the users posting maximum posts/threads. The same goes to rating content as well.

H) Moderator/Algorithm must choose the Content, Urls to be placed in the home page of the site.

I) Sharing the content is very essential, Users should be able to share any content with their friends.

J) Having a Personalized and customizable user profile is very essential.

K) Rating of Users by different level of activity on the site is good feature.

L) User Voting on the content is important aspect of the website.

M) The best content or Top Viewed/Rated Content must be clearly highlighted.

N) Users could be stalked by other users. Send a Add a friend request to other users.

O) All the content on the site to be made available to search engine crawlers.

P) Link back or track back Urls are essential. giving a link to posts which link to this content.

Q) In Q & A, giving rating to answers, users, and choosing a best answer is very essential.

R) Commenting is another most important aspect of the Social network. Giving a comment on every post increases the overall content on that page, helps it rank better in site search as well as organic web search.

S) Sending personal messages to other users is an important feature.

T) The user profile must exist in unique static Url which can be shared, linked from elsewhere on the web.

U) RSS feeds of user generated content is important. Users must be able to subscribe to other user generated content.

V) Including a plugin code which can help embed user generated content into an external blog, website is a useful tool.

W) The website must be able to assess the semantic relevance of the content posted by user and associate a relevant category or a tag to it.

X) The content posted by user should be sent as feed to various other vertical search engines and meta search engines.

Y) Every location or geography must have unique domain and contain local content.

Z) On every content page there must be links to other similar content.

AA) Marking a content as favorite is essential.

AB) Generating Quality Traffic & exposing Quality content. Both are reciprocal, you need to expose quality content to users and search engines and hence attract quality users to site.

AC) Moderator must be experienced and very good in promoting the right content.

AD) Users must be able to Bulk edit and manage the content submitted by them.

AE) License for every content submitted is essential

AF) Giving a number on every element based on its activity is very essential.

i) Number of Views of a content.
ii) Number of Votes to a content or answer.
iii) Number to every user based on his level of activity.
iv) Number of Comments on a content.
v) Number of Friends to each user.
vi) Number of webpages linking to each content.
vii) Number of categories, tags through which you can find this content.
viii) Number of Favorites for this content.

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Here are some of my suggestions on how Youtube can win both companies’ as well as users popularity.

1) Discriminate the content on Youtube as User generated, Copyrighted.

2) Make deals with TV channels to publish Youtube’s user generated videos on TV program’s such as Top videos of the week. Top funny videos etc.. This would encourage people to post personal videos as viewer ship increases.

3) Ask big brands to purchase users videos which become popular. For example Nike could copyright popular user videos on football etc…

4) Reward the users whose videos get selected for TV broadcast or get Branded. These videos will be of course original videos

5) Distribute & publish popular Youtube videos across various other sites on Internet

From Advertisers Perspective:

1) Display Image Ads & Text Ads beside videos of similar theme.

2) Advertising costs are higher for Ads showing alongside videos that generate high volume of traffic

3) Upload advertiser’s videos which are displayed alongside popular videos of similar content.

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Most Social Network community generally has following options:

1) Anyone can join / Moderator regulated
2) Forum Postings ? anonymous / non- anonymous
3) Messages ? Allow /Disallow members to send messages to each other.
4) More the number of people joining the group higher your community appears in search results.

Advantage Users: Ability to connect to interested people, share all forms of content. The users can join communities or create communities and invite other users & interact with them.

Advantage Advertisers/Marketers: Find group of similar interest people and find their target audience in one single location. The people on the network are at high interest levels therefore would increase the chance of generating prospective leads.

The Useful tips for Marketers for promoting their websites and brands on social networks are.

1) Create Communities Online related to your industry and company. But remember to keep it general & non profit as a social contribution and not at all as marketing & promotion technique

2) Invite people to join your network.

3) Offer help, advise, technical assistance and guidance to people. Even if it means acknowledging the advantages of your competitors products/services.

4) Ensure that you maintain your reputation in the community & network online

5) Communicate with the aim to increase your target audience’ awareness, & knowledge.

6) Join Other Communities and Groups. Ask their members to join your community.

7) Publish the Top messages, discussions on blog, website etc?create a RSS feed and ask users to subscribe.

Distribute Viral to community members

9) Tag your community with the right keywords, synonyms

10) Communicate you target audience with good enriching content.

11) Identify & be aware of your target audience. Send specific high interest messages to specific audience. Give individual attention & listen to your audience. Do not copy past a standard template and send it across to everyone..

12) Be an active blogger.

Top Social Networks

1) Youtube
2) Linkedin.com
3) MySpace.com
4) Orkut.com
5) Facebook.com (Most College Students from Top Universities worldwide & Professionals from Companies)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

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