Most marketers know the old adage (attributed to John Wanamaker):

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

This aphorism has actually become a battle cry for many digital marketers who-with the help of various ad serving technologies (and other means that were not around in Wanamaker’s day) are able to better determine how well their advertising is doing.

This notion of accountability has been something that the social media marketer has been grappling more fiercely in the past few years.  The reason this has become such a hot topic for social media marketers is, most social media takes place in the digital sphere; and many marketers equate digital with accountability. For those of us living in the real world; this is simply not true. What is true is that-due to the fact that most social media takes place online-the ability to figure out what is working and what is  not working is substantial; as is the ability to optimize efforts.

Here are a few ways I think about optimizing social media efforts:

• Use search as conversational hearing aid-how well your conversations are doing at creating demand for a specific product/topic etc?
  • Search volume lift on major engines around a given term/concept that you are talking to consumers about is a way to determine how well you are doing at having effective consumer conversations online
• Content as arbiter of interest
  • Controlled, methodological content creation can act as a consumer question; web activity can act as implied answers
    • e.g. Put five product shots online-what is getting the most views? What are people commenting on?

• Learn to be a social media traffic cop
  • Define where most of your social media traffic is coming from.
    • Where does your audience spend most of their time?
  • Some properties don’t allow tracking codes in URL’s-but that does not mean you cannot build custom landing pages that cater to traffic coming from certain sites (i.e. http://amediacirc.us/facebook)

I doubt anyone will ever know how well the sum total of their marketing dollars are doing-and how many dollars are wasted. Still, we do have an advantage on Mr. Wanamaker!