Unless, of course, you’re actually putting in the effort to effectively market that website and get people to visit it, whether it be through SEO, email marketing, or ads.

But then how do you go about converting those visitors – the people that find your website through that search engine marketing, those emails, or those ad placements – into qualified leads, and better yet, paying customers?

The answer isn’t necessarily simple, but it is pretty straightforward: Make your method of capturing leads as simple and compelling as possible. Here are a few ways that any business can easily do so without making any substantial changes to the layout of their website.

Offer Something for Free

Regardless of whether your company is business-oriented or consumer-oriented, the fact remains that people like free things, especially if those things are useful and/or delightful. Say, for example, you’re a financial planner. Why not offer a free white paper or case study on the benefits of planning for the long-term versus trying to account for the volatility of the market on a weekly basis? And these don’t have to be totally free for say – you can simply ask for an email.  And then chances are, you’ve just gotten a very qualified lead.

But these don’t have to be just case studies or white papers. They can be coupons, or free consultations, or a free sticker – something that has your company’s name on it, and that offers real value to the user, but that would also be compelling and sensible enough to get them to want more from your organization. A taste, per say.

Make Contact As Easy As Possible

Chances are, if someone has visited your website and is ready to reach out to you, they’re at the very least interested in your products or services, and at best ready to write the check.

But wait, your contact page simply lists a contact email. So now that person has to copy and paste that email into their mail client, draft up an email with whatever it is they want to say to you – “hey, I’m interested in some things!” – and click send. That’s annoying.

Make it easier. Contacting you on your website should be as simple as filling in a few boxes of information – name, company, email, what we’re interested in – and simply click submit (or send, or ‘Say Hey!’, or whatever).

The easier it is, the more likely that person will be to actually submit their contact info. And the greater the likelihood is that you’ll wind up with a highly qualified lead that you might be able to turn into a long-term customer. Here’s a good example:

Give Them a Reason to Come Back

Some of the best marketing I’ve seen is actually in the newsletters that I’ll receive from some of my favorite resources – SproutSocial, Quora – on a weekly basis. Not only do these emails provide me with compelling content – including useful infographics and blogs in the case of Sprout, and the most interesting Q&A threads on the website in the case of Quora – but they also provide me with plenty of incentive to visit those websites in order to see what else they have to offer.

But the fact is, in order to get people to come back to your website regularly, you need to offer them something. Whether it’s fresh blog content, new studies or whitepapers, or new offers, that ‘something’ should be presented as an invitation to learn more about your organization, or connect with them. Social media is great for this, as it offers you the opportunity to constantly engage your targeted audience on a regular basis.

The fact is, there is a direct correlation between the amount of effort you put into marketing your website – through email marketing, or advertising, or SEO – and the success you’ll have in generating leads through that.

The reason websites generate little to no traffic for most businesses? They don’t market it. Simply as that.

Do you have a means of capturing leads in place on your website?

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But there are some things that a lot of those content distributors have generally accepted as nonissues that are, in fact, huge issues.

Here are just a few social media conventions that, while seemingly negligent, can have a huge impact on the effectiveness of your social media channels in the long-run.

You Don’t Have to Post on the Weekends

People like to relax on the weekends – grab dinner with friends, catch up on shows that they’ve recorded on their DVR, maybe even watch football . And that’s all fine and dandy, because it’s good to relax on the weekends. You do enough during the week, right?

The problem is, that’s one of the worst times to ‘relax’ in the world of social media. The weekends, on average, are the best days to post as far as engagement rates are concerned. According to a recent study by Buddy Media, engagement rates on the weekend are as much as 69% and 17% higher on Facebook and Twitter, yet less than 10% and 19% of brands post then, respectively.

Why? Simply because users are always looking to consume content, particularly on the weekends. The problem is, most brands don’t take the time to develop content for the weekend and post it then. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to save your best content for the weekend, then?

And wait, what’s that? You can schedule your posts on Facebook and Twitter (using Hootsuite, Sproutsocial, or Buffer)? **Head explodes.**

Not Being a Morningperson/Nightowl is OK

You don’t want anyone to talk to you before you’ve had your 4^th cup of coffee, I completely understand. And you also don’t want to receive any emails past 5 p.m. That’s fine, I won’t send you this great cat video I found online. Your loss.

But again, in the world of social media, not being a morning person or a night owl can be bad. Very bad. Why? Because those are great off-peak hours (for Facebook). According to that same study by Buddy Media, those off-peak hours received as much as 19% higher interaction rates.

Twitter posts, on the other hand, actually fared better in that regard, garnering generally higher engagement rates during the on-peak hours.

Still, pay close attention to analytics and find out what times are best for you. You might find out that 11 a.m. in the middle of the week works wayyy better than 9 p.m. on a Sunday.

Consumers Don’t Expect You to Respond to Them

Do you know what percentage of social media users’ posts are responded to? Roughly 5%. Now, what percentage of users expect to receive a response when they post something on a brands social media page? 3 out of 5.

That’s a huge discrepancy, and a significant problem for brands that are trying to tout their openness and willingness to communicate freely with their consumers.

Consumers don’t only expect you to respond to them, they want you to respond to them. Engagement is key to social media, and convincing users that your social media channels aren’t simply another way to advertise to users – that you value feedback and communication with those users – is important in maintaining those relationships with your consumers.

The More Social Media Channels You’re On, The Better

Between blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, YouTube channels and Google+ accounts, GM has over 50 social media accounts that are maintained on a regular basis. It’s impressive.

But GM also spends over $30 million a year creating content for those pages. Gulp.

Chances are, if you’re reading this article, you or your friend’s business doesn’t have access to those sorts of resources, nor do they have the time. The solution? Focus on just one or two social media channels to begin with.

If you’re a fashion company, focus on Pinterest and perhaps Twitter or Instagram. If you’re a bakery, Facebook and maybe Twitter.

Focus on one to two networks to begin with, then once you’ve familiarized yourself with those and become successful in generating some sort of engagement on those networks, then you can work on getting onto other social media channels.

Simply put, most small companies don’t have the resources to put content onto 4 or 5 different social media channels without seeing a huge overlap, or taking up a significant amount of their own internal resources.

Keep it simple. Don’t spread yourself too thin.

Nobody Wants to Hear About Our Company

This one is just plain wrong. Chances are, if somebody has decided to follow your company through social media, they want to hear everything that you have to say, even if it’s a little self-indulgent. (Or, in the case of some, very self-indulgent.)

So don’t hesitate to post pictures about employees having fun, or making something amazing, or doing something cool. And don’t be shy about drumming up support for awards you’ve recently received, and things that you’ve done in and around the community that might be special to you, but that you automatically assume people won’t care about.

People probably will care about it. And if they don’t, who cares? There’s always tomorrow, and the next day. And the day after that.

Despite still being in its relative infancy, companies (and people alike) have quickly learned the ins-and-outs of how the various social media channels work, and what practices will drive engagement, versus what practices will drive people away.

Those ‘conventions’ that you might have assumed were correct? They may have been keeping you away from unlocking the real potential of your social media presences.

Source: MSM DesignZ, Inc. is a Westchester NY Social Media company specializing in advertising, web and graphic design, and SEO.

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For a company like Amazon, one might associate things like the Amazon ‘swoop’ that’s attached to all of their packages, the Kindle, and speedy delivery and (typically) excellent customer service. These components are all part of the Amazon brand, for sure.

But most people would also associate Amazon.com with all of these other elements. Ecommerce was, after all, how Amazon got started. Amazon’s website is a core part of the Amazon brand.

But it isn’t just Amazon that derives a lot of potential value from their web presence – it’s every business, really. Whether it’s a social media channel, or simply a blog, how a business represents itself on the web isn’t simply another means of providing customers with a way to interact with that business – it’s an extension of their brand.

So what does that mean for businesses?

It Needs to Look Professional

Gone are the days in which it was ‘okay’ to have a website that was developed in MS Paint by your cousin’s nephew. Now, businesses are practically being forced to invest money into their web presence and in new technologies in order to keep pace with their competitors.

And it’s important that every business has an online presence that they think will adequately reflect their own business goals, because things like websites, and social media channels are perhaps the first portals that people will be turning to in order to find out anything about a business. Then they might call them, and then a transaction might be made.

But chances are, it won’t happen the other way around. Now, more than ever, people are turning to the web to get basic information and reviews regarding businesses. To better inform themselves of the accreditation of that business before they reach out to that business – to learn about their brand.

And frankly, if that business has a crummy website, and puts absolutely no effort into their social media channels, that first impression won’t exactly be glowing.

It Should Reflect Your Unique Brand Voice

Beyond being professional, an online presence should also adequately reflect how a business wants to be perceived by its consumers. A business shouldn’t hesitate to ask questions like: “Who are my consumers? What do they love about my business?”

What that means is that on the web, a brand’s content should reflect how they want their consumers to perceive of them. If consumers are used to a quirky, fun place in-store, and then are suddenly introduced to a rough-and-tumble tone online – through social media, or blog posts – they’ll most likely be turned off.

That’s why it’s important to maintain consistency between offline personality and online personality. Customers like consistency.

Things like social media and websites are no longer optional, as they were just several years ago, even for small businesses with limited resources for marketing.

Still, there are plenty businesses can do to positively reflect their brand on the web without spending an excessive amount of money. For one, taking the time to build out a good-looking online presence through a platform like Virb or WordPress would be a great starting point, both of which are inexpensive. Another important step to take would be to ensure that cover photos and profile pictures on social media presences are updated and look god.

These things aren’t exactly expensive, they just might take time. But from a consumer’s perspective, the value in a lot of these components is incredible, and is undoubtedly worth the additional time commitment (and possible investment) that it might take to create an online presence that truly reflects that brand in a professional manner online.

Source: MSM DesignZ, Inc. is a Westchester social media company based in NY specializing in advertising, web and graphic design, and SEO.

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Or to put it more crudely, Facebook is the blackhole of internet usage – in goes our free time, and out comes… photos of cats?

And that’s where my appreciation of Facebook falls off a sharp cliff. While I am absolutely impressed by the sheer amount of information and usage that people put into the ubiquitous social network, I’m simultaneously saddened by the number of useless status updates (but let’s be honest, who hasn’t sent one of those?) that I typically find peppered throughout my news feed. Sure, I opted-in to their updates by friending them, but where’s the line drawn? Why can’t I just reclaim my feed?

And that’s part of the reason why I’m moving onto Twitter, and focusing most of my attention away from Facebook (I know, this isn’t groundbreaking stuff). Twitter – for both information and even authentic conversation – is just better, and here’s why.

Twitter Is More Conducive Towards Conversation

I know I’ve argued this point before, but it bears repeating: As it relates to conversations, Twitter is simply better. It’s not magical or anything – Twitter doesn’t automatically help you find everything that might be relevant to you (although it certainly does help at times), but it does present all of the information that you sign-up for in real-time. Which means that one moment you might be hearing about breaking news regarding a topic in the Middle East from The Economist, but in the next instance are finding one of your friends asking for help finding a local Japanese restaurant.

Facebook has that, too, certainly, but it’s more of a walled-off garden than a hodgepodge of conversation, which means that while it might be easier to find relevant conversations among your friends, when it comes to stuff from outsiders, you’re pretty much out of luck.

And that’s kind of a bummer, because I think that open conversation – having people from a diverse set of backgrounds discuss a particular topic – is part of what drives social media. Facebook isn’t the huge convention of conversations; it’s the cocktail party.

And Where People Share News That Matters

Simply put, more news outlets and influential individuals have turned to Twitter to share information to the world than anywhere else (sometimes too much information, though).

And if you look at some of the world’s biggest news stories over the years – the Hudson River plane landing, the protests in Egypt, the riots in London – a large majority of them were broken on Twitter.

That doesn’t simply speak to the power of Twitter as a social networking tool – it speaks to the power of Twitter as a central hub for all of the information that matters in the world.

So when I want to learn about what’s happening in the world – about what’s important right now – I don’t turn to Flipboard, or the NY Times, or Facebook – I turn to Twitter.

It’s amazing to think that Twitter was a tool that people simply wrote-off as ‘Facebook Lite’, or the ‘Facebook Status Update Machine’ or one of the other hundreds of nicknames that people originally gave it. I, too, definitely wrote it off as such years ago when it was just in its infancy, and when the only notable person I knew using it was Ashton Kutcher (who I don’t really care about).

But it’s gone a long way since its Ashton Kutcher days, and its evolution into a social-discover platform wasn’t just an overnight process. I firmly believe that Twitter, since its inception, has always been about enabling the flow of information, and not simply just ‘status updates’.

And whether it’s a breaking news story about a recent political sex scandal, or simply Aaron Paul (aka Jesse from Breaking Bad) hosting a Q&A, Twitter has given us greater access to celebrities, entrepreneurs, and to information as a whole more than ever before.

Which do you prefer?

Source: MSM DesignZ, Inc. is a Westchester social media company based in NY specializing in advertising, web and graphic design, and SEO.

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But the websites that are the most successful in driving in that traffic probably don’t rely on things like sheer luck or just doing whatever. Instead, chances are they’re relying on some sort of internal calendar in order to pump out the content that will work to drive those visitors towards their websites.

And content calendars are important because they help businesses frame and plan out the ‘how’ of their online presences — how they plan on driving traffic, and how they plan on getting people talking about their brand.

Here are a few ways that any business can create a great content calendar that can become an infinitely useful internal resource, and the ideal guide for providing useful (and marketable) content to its users.

Take Note Of Important Company Milestones

You’re going about your normal day doing things – working on projects, developing new products, whatever – and then all of a sudden – ‘bam!’ – you realize that it’s your company’s 10^th anniversary.

But that shouldn’t just happen. Your company – regardless of whether it makes cake or plumbing supplies – probably has milestones, and has probably done some things that it can be proud of.

Which is why those sorts of events – a 1,000th customer, a birthday, a 50^th employee – shouldn’t simply be brushed over. They should be take into consideration when developing a content calendar, including any associated social media and blog posts.

Chances are, if you have some customers, those customers probably care about your business and what’s going on at your business, and they’d probably be readily willing to share those milestones with their friends.

Make it Fun for You, but Relevant To Your Customers

Work is perhaps stressful enough, having to juggle a wide range of tasks while keeping a levelhead.

A content schedule should be an important part of how your company operates – what you share with your clients or consumers – but it shouldn’t be a complete drag. It should be something that employees actively contribute to not simply because they have to create the content, but because they find it fun.

But it shouldn’t merely be a whacky expose of the inner-workings of your organization. It should reflect things like company culture, for sure, what’s going on within your organization, and what sort of things you like to talk about (and that your customers love to hear), but it should also keep in mind that there are people looking in from the inside.

Make It Flexible

Beyond relevance, your content schedule should also be something that has plenty of flexibility in terms of what content goes where and when that content is distributed. Having content in place weeks in advance is good, but it’s also relatively worthless if you can’t change that content as important events come and go.

Say, for example, one week you’re planning on promoting a new product through press releases, blogs and social media, but the week prior to that recently saw your company be purchased by a much larger conglomerate.

Your content schedule needs to provide your organization with the flexibility to still maintain updates around possibly bigger, or more urgent news.

Though these factors all play an important role in developing a great content calendar, perhaps the most important factor is simply providing great content – whether those articles be in the form of helpful blog posts, shareable social media posts, or great press releases that everyone wants to talk about.

Then it’s simply a matter of figuring out how, when and why you’re distributing that content to your consumers. Enter: Your super-amazing content calendar.

Source: MSM DesignZ, Inc. is a Westchester social media company based in NY specializing in advertising, web and graphic design, and SEO.

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And in light of the epic failure that was Facebook Deals, something that lasted for only 4 months, it’s good to see that Facebook has finally found a method that allows businesses on Facebook to drive users of their Facebook page directly into their stores (or onto their websites) in the form of Facebook Offers.

But now, in light of the increasingly lofty expectations of Wall Street and stockholders, Facebook has turned the once free Offers service into something that requires advertisers to spend at least $5 in promoting it.

Great for Facebook, but terrible for businesses, right? Not exactly. 

Forcing Businesses to Explore Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads are amazing. Because of the incredible amount of information that Facebook has on each of its users, Facebook Ads allow advertisers to create hyper-targeted ads that are catered towards people who will be more likely to click on them. And through those ads, advertisers can promote their own Facebook pages, websites, and even specific posts.

Unfortunately, only a small percentage of small business owners have actually used Facebook Ads, according to a study by ZDNet. Obviously, that’s a huge amount of potential advertising dollars that Facebook is missing out on, with the U.S. consisting of over 99% small businesses.

Now, by making ad spending a mandatory part of Facebook Offers, businesses that choose to utilize Facebook Offers are now forced to explore what sort of options Facebook has with regard to advertising.

Think about it this way: If a business owner runs a Facebook Offer, promotes it, and it falls flat on its face, they’re only out $5, and Facebook has just convinced them to use their ads.

But now, if they run an offer, find that Facebook Ads had a significant impact on the promotion of that offer, they might determine that advertising through Facebook is worth it, and explore the wide array of other advertising options that Facebook offers.

Score (for Facebook)!

Encouraging Businesses to Think

Beyond simply exploring Facebook Ads, businesses will now have to think more intelligently about the coupons that they’re offering. Before, when it was free, there was no love lost from a business (or consumer) perspective when nobody redeemed a coupon. Now that it’s $5, and businesses need to promote it, they’ll start thinking about things like, “Do my consumers care about this stuff? Will it resonate with them?” before placing the promotion.

And chances are, this will result in less useless coupons that don’t necessarily offer much in the way of value, and more intelligent offers that not only create value for consumers, but also for the businesses that are trying to turn their Facebook traffic into paying customers. It will probably also encourage them to find other means of promoting those offers, whether it be through an email newsletter or through their website.

Does your business use Facebook Offers?

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Obviously, there’s a huge discrepancy between expectations from consumers, and expectations from brands. Many brands, for the most part, still view the concept of maintaining an active, and responsive presence on social media that is constantly monitored as sort-of optional, even though a recent report from Mckinsey Global Institute puts the potential value of tweeting at work at something along the lines of $900 billion to $1.3 trillion.

Consumers, on the other hand, expect a lot more from the brands that they are actively liking and following on Facebook and Twitter and other social networks, which should encourage brands to go well beyond their current ‘fire and forget’ approach towards social media.

Even so, many haven’t, and if that report by Mckinsey Global Institute is even remotely accurate, that’s a very expensive problem.

Here are just some of the ways that increased activity on social media can help brands.

Improved Customer Relations

Social media has long been seen as a tool that can help cut down on the response times for customer service inquiries, all the while seamlessly marketing a brand and improving relations among consumers.

Unfortunately, not a significant amount of brands turn to social media in order to solve their consumer relations problems, instead leveraging social media as simply another way to market their brand. This is all even in light of the fact that statistics clearly support the fact that brands that exceed customer service expectations — through social media and otherwise — are far more likely to be talked about on social media. Beyond that, the social media users of those brands spend as much as 21% more than everyone else.

Whole Foods provides an excellent example of a brand leveraging social media in order to improve customer relations, spending roughly 40 hours a week listening and responding to inquiries from their customers on Twitter. This approach hasn’t just worked — it’s proved exceptionally successful for Whole Foods, netting them well over 2.8 million followers on Twitter.

Improved Internal Communication and Organization

In that same report by Mckinsey Global Institute, the company estimates that roughly two-thirds of the savings for brands in social media lies in, “improved communications and collaboration within and across enterprises.” In all, they estimate that between $600 to over $900 billion could be saved if an organization adopted social media internally and started using it to greatly improve communications throughout their enterprise. That’s a lot of money.

And it doesn’t necessarily have to begin with using large, multi-channel social media networks that are built solely for enterprises.

Instead, it could be as simple as having every employee adopt Twitter and use it once a day, or contribute to a LinkedIn group once a week, or monitor a brand’s Facebook page one day of the week.

Beyond that, free services like Do and Asana allow small to medium-sized (and even larger) organizations easily manage projects and update one another on the status of those projects.

Simply put, the more organizations start adopting this technology and using it, the more they’ll be able to find unique ways to save money. And maybe they’ll quickly find out that that meeting in order to discuss the status of ‘that project’ project is actually kind of unnecessary, because everyone’s been keeping up with its status (and updating one another) through social media. 1 hour of productivity gained!

Mckinsey Global Institute’s survey reveals one thing: social media isn’t simply powerful in its ability to carry messages throughout the world, but also in its ability to make us all far more efficient in our communications with one another.

Just think about all of the time you would save if you could communicate (and receive responses to) problems quickly and seamlessly with any brand in 140 characters or less through Twitter. Or if a brand’s customers helped answer another person’s inquiry through Facebook. Or if projects could be easily updated and commented on through some sort of internal social networking.

Probably a lot.

How does your organization use social media to create more efficient communications?

Source: MSM DesignZ, Inc. is a Westchester social media company based in NY specializing in advertising, web and graphic design, and SEO.

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But David’s theory doesn’t just apply to the mobile web. In fact, it’s a theory that applies to everything that we do on the modern web — basically, context is important regardless of whether we’re exploring the web on a desktop PC, a laptop, a smartphone, or a tablet.

And that’s why it’s important for us all to start rethinking how we approach the web. The web is no longer a ‘gold rush’ as it once was. Though there are literally millions upon millions of websites out there, the value in simply being on the web — in having a website, or a mobile application, or being on social media — is no longer what it once was in the early days of the Internet.

Here’s why.

Consumers Want Experiences

The way we consume the web has evolved so much in just the past 10 years alone. What was primarily desktop driven, has now begun to increasingly migrate towards smartphones and tablets. In fact, according to a study by Chitika, we currently do upwards of 20% of our web browsing through smartphones and tablets.

And with that transition from desktops to smartphones and tablet computers comes an entirely new way in which we consume the web. Now, instead of being primarily input driven, as it has been in the desktop days, we are starting to see a web that is more consumption driven. We consume digital news, social media, and applications ferociously throughout the web, and we watch movies, sports games, and even our favorite TV shows all of the time.

Context Matters

Perhaps the biggest change that has occurred over the course of the modern web’s evolution has been the number of devices that we are now consuming the web on.

It is that reason alone that context has become more important than ever. The ways in which users interact with the web depends almost entirely on the device that they are viewing it from. For example, while desktop users might be perfectly okay with navigating directly to their favorite blogs or news sources, tablet and smartphone users might turn to apps such as Pulse, Flipboard, or one of the 10s of other RSS feed apps.

Mobile users still navigate to websites, for sure, but with the proliferation of native applications on those devices, the mobile web is becoming more and more app-centric.

Simply put, websites aren’t nearly as impactful on mobile devices as mobile applications.

Making Experiences Work for Every Device

Finally, perhaps the most important thing to consider with the recent advent of things like smartphones and apps, is the importance of creating user experiences that work across a wide gamut of devices, and allow users to easily access (or interact) with whatever information you’ve presented them regardless of what device they are viewing that from.

Cloud-based applications like Gmail and Evernote do this exceptionally well, providing apps and websites that are oriented around how that particular device will be used for just about any device available.

And this is important because, as David Armano noted, it’s what makes the difference between mobile and mobility. A mobile app that works solely as a mobile app is simply mobile. But a mobile app that constantly keeps your information updated on a remote server that you can easily access from your tablet or your desktop?

That’s mobility.

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So we — us marketers — just sit around and twiddle our thumbs because, really, we can’t do anything but cross our fingers, right?

Well no, not really. There are ways in which marketers can (and have) tie the value of their social marketing initiatives to concrete dollar figures, as I’ve explored in one of my previous articles, and marketers are always looking for new means of gauging those social media successes.

Here are 4 ways to easily track the value of your social media marketing initiatives by thinking beyond things like ‘engagement’ and ‘community’ and whatever else.

1. Subscribers 

It’s not uncommon for business owners to send out weekly or monthly newsletters to their consumers in order to keep them up to date on the latest in their particular industry, or the newest products and services that they are releasing. But in order to (legally) send out that newsletter, businesses must first gain subscribers.

A great way for a business to measure the value of their social media initiatives is by driving those fans and followers away from social media, and onto an extremely valuable medium — just take a look at this article, for example – such as email. Email provides a simple way for any business to drive fans and followers further down the sales funnel and onto a sales channel that is known for its extremely high conversion rates.

2. Contests

Contests are another excellent way to track the value of social media channels, often inciting action among followers and encouraging them to contribute something. That said, there’s a difference between running a contest that can be incredibly valuable for you — think photos and other user-generated content — and something that could be very costly, like giving away a free iPad.

Not only can contests be a unique way to engage a social media audience, but they can also provide businesses with plenty of useful information and content from their social media followers.

3. Coupons

This one is pretty simple: Offering coupons — i.e. Facebook Offers, or Foursquare specials — is perhaps one of the most straightforward ways to track the value of social media audiences, and for many social media channels, it’s free.

4. Social Media-Centric Sales Channels

Beyond coupons, perhaps one of the most effective means of directly tying social media traffic to a dollar figure is to create social media-centric sales channels. Instead of simply using Twitter as another means of marketing a product, why not use it as the only means to sell that product? Or, like this coffee shop in Houston, as a means of placing orders?

And there are plenty of other great examples of businesses using their social media channels in order to sell directly to consumers, like Nike. Or Sony.

Still, none of these are necessarily bulletproof means of determining the value of social media channels because, frankly, there are a lot of different variables that go into determining that value. The value of a Facebook fan, from one user to the next, might vary greatly, for example. And the same with retweets, likes, shares, subscribers, coupon redemptions, etc.

But beyond actual dollar figures, it is still very important that a business sees interaction among its social media users. If those interaction rates are high, chances are that those users are most likely incredibly valuable to that business.

But if those interaction rates are low, it won’t really matter how great they are at measuring the value of their followers.

How has your business found ways in which to measure the value of its social media initiatives?

Source: MSM DesignZ, Inc. is a Westchester social media company based in NY specializing in advertising, web and graphic design, and SEO.

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It’s a strange analogy, I know, but the SEO world is a very rough-and-tumble sort of place. Though Google (and other search engines) has constantly tried to fend off the rebels of the SEO world with constant new changes to their massive search engine’s algorithm, the experts of the SEO world consistently find workarounds that enable them to rank highly in search engines without necessarily abiding by the rules.

That said, there are still plenty of ways to develop a search engine optimized web presence without necessarily taking shortcuts. And although, for the most part, good guides like SEOmoz require a membership and are typically expensive, there are plenty of tools available out there to help any webmaster or developer optimize their website for maximum searchability.

Here are just a few of our favorites.

Alexa

Alexa is perhaps the best tool on the web for determining the domain authority of a particular website. Essentially, Alexa allows users to easily look up individual sites, determining things like overall domain authority, number of inbound links, and a range of other factors.

But basically, Alexa is extremely useful for helping you determine how effective a website’s link-building techniques have been to this point, and search terms that they are effectively marketing their business towards (and receiving traffic from). Understanding where someone is getting their links from will not only help you find new means of developing links — whether it be through directories, or guest posting on similar sites — but will also help you understand the power of that company’s links.

It doesn’t matter if a website is receiving tens of thousands of inbound links from other sites if those aren’t from websites that are considered reputable. One link from the NYTimes is way more powerful than 10,000 links from Joe Schmoe’s blog.

PR Checker

Pagerank checkers are important because, like Alexa, they help us understand the overall authority of a page according to Google. Search for NYTimes.com, for example, and you’ll find that it has a Pagerank of 9, which is obscene. That means that it’s getting linked to and visited by many, many highly reputable sources.

If you’re just getting into the game, and you’re trying to compete with the NYTimes in search engines from an online news perspective, I would advise you to either look elsewhere, or to find a shrink.

Pagerank checker can help you to easily understand your competition — Google a search term you’re interested in that is local, specific, and not necessarily extremely competitive — by indicating the difficulty of competing with those companies on search terms. Check out the first 3 listings of terms you’re trying to compete with in order to find if it will be worth your time.

Google Adwords Tool

Though there are other, more diverse tools for looking up Google search terms, nothing really beats Google’s Adwords tool in terms of freeness. Using this tool, you can easily determine the competition levels of certain terms, and find terms that are significantly less competition, but still highly trafficked.

When you’re first breaking into SEO, you’ll want to go for terms with low competition, but with relatively high search rates. And depending on your business, you’ll probably also want to take location into account.

SEO Site Checkup

SEO Site Checkup allows you to easily find out what you’re doing well with your website — are your metatags working correctly? Is Google correctly crawling your website? — and what might be broken, or incorrectly displayed, or that you’re simply not doing. It’s an easy to use tool that provides you with a plethora of information that you probably don’t care about, but that can be extremely important from a webmaster’s perspective.

Google Webmaster Tools

Finally, Google’s Webmaster Tools also provide a great complement to SEO Site Checkup for determining what’s functioning well with a website, and what isn’t. Google will inform you of any crawl errors that its search engine might be having with your website, if you’re missing any important files, and if there are any serious errors — i.e. 404 errors — that are inhibiting the user experience, and thus impacting your search engine rankings.

Beyond that, the webmaster tools also provide you with a detailed breakdown of where your Google traffic is coming from, and where you rank for the search terms that you are targeting.

Real, good SEO for highly competitive terms takes time and lots, and lots of effort (and sometimes luck) in order to achieve. But these tools will give any webmaster, developer or business owner a good sense of what their competitors are doing well, what they might be doing wrong, and things that they can fix in terms of website design and a range of other factors.

There are tons of other tools available on the web, though, and these don’t even scratch the surface.

What are some of your favorite SEO tools?

Source: MSM DesignZ, Inc. is a Westchester NY SEO company specializing in social media, web and graphic design, and advertising.

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