Social Media ROI Coming Under the Spotlight

After the depressingly predictable social media goldrush seen this year, it appears that questions are starting to be asked of social media and its actual commercial impact.

It's probably about time that some of the heat was taken out of the social media sector. For example just take a look at the starting salaries for social media jobs, the number of self titled social media consultants cropping up around the place, and training courses available. An offshore SEO company contacted me the other day about their services, including what they now call SMO (social media optimisation).

However I recently learnt of a social media debate at Marketing Week, in which Mark Ritson challenges whether Twitter is really a relevant online space for commercial brands to occupy, or instead the preserve of celebrity driven personality culture. As Ritson puts it, social media is a "new and relatively insignificant communications tool that has limited potential for a very small proportion of brands". Ouch.

Then this morning I just read a very good post by Joe Hughes about social media ROI, which illustrates the different ways in which the value to be gained from Social Media could and should be measured. However, Hughes does conclude that Social Media can be very valuable as a brand reputation management tool.

Personally, I can see some value in social media, and feel it is worth participating in. But I am yet to find a good example of a website which has been able to transform social media activity into a core promotional tool that generates value. Twitter followers don't always mean revenue!

Useful Sites For Finding People To Follow On Twitter

Here is a really useful list of sites to help find people to follow on Twitter. In addition to this list I would add the Twellow directory.

Of course the idea of following people, it to get followers back, and so you want an auto follow thank you message in place which mentions your site and message. You can set this up automatically for multiple Twitter accounts at Social Oomph.

Google Caffeine and it's Impact on SEO

Google fully rolled our their new web indexing system, Caffeine, on June 8th this year. But what are the implications for SEO and link building?

Distribute Tweets on Twitter in Advance

Just been setting up a new Twitter account for a client, Sygma Solutions, and came across a feature of Social Oomph (formally known as Tweetlater) that allows you to schedule the advance distribution of Twitter tweets.

I've already used Social Oomph extensively as a third party tool for manually scheduling tweets for a range of client twitter accounts, but I hadn't come across the 'Distribute Scheduled Updates' function before.

It appears to allow you to schedule a batch of tweets to be broadcast regularly at intervals of days, hours or minutes (if you have a lot to say!). You can also schedule your tweets to appear within set times and on specific days of the week.

Where did Twitterfeed go?

Twitterfeed, the online service which lets you send RSS feeds to your Twitter account, seems to be having some problems.

Their site appears to have been replaced with a spammy domain holding page. Maybe the owners have pulled the site down, or someone else has managed to renew it? Also, the feeds I had set up don't seem to be publishing.

Whatever the reasons this is a real shame - I've been using Twitterfeed for months now to send third party feeds to client twitter accounts, to help increase their tweet volume.

I've been looking for replacements, and am trialling http://rss2twitter.com. It doesn't seem to have all the same functionality as Twitterfeed, like scheduling of updates of the RSS feed, but we'll see how it works - at the moment its set up to send 3 rss feeds to http://twitter.com/dressingupideas.