The development of new online destinations for information sharing and interactive communication by and between family and friends as well as professional associates is consistently cited as the driving force behind Web 2.0. Termed “Social Media”, the trend has created abundant opportunities to distribute high quality health and disease education content, while creating community and entirely new opportunities for collaboration between your business and its customers.

One of the web’s most recognized information sources, Wikipedia, defines “Social media marketing” as a term that describes the act of using social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or any other collaborative Internet form of media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service. Common social media marketing tools include, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and YouTube as well as many independent subject matter blogs. In the context of Internet marketing, social media refers to a collective group of web properties whose content is primarily published by users, not direct employees of the property (e.g. the vast majority of video on YouTube is published by non-YouTube employees).

To capitalize on this emerging trend, your business needs to develop a comprehensive Social Media Marketing strategy. By developing and implementing a carefully planned social media strategy, you can take advantage of current media trends, to accomplish multiple objectives including broadening the reach of your brand and providing an interactive platform for communication with and between your business and your customers.

As with all things web, things change rapidly and having and maintaining active “Social Media Marketing” strategy takes work and cooperative effort from multiple areas of the your organization including management, operations, and communications. Through minimal effort you can yield extraordinary results and form an effective plan for increasing site traffic and brand awareness for your business

Development of the your business’s social marketing strategy is suggested as the first step in defining an online media plan to boost your online marketing efforts. While social networking sites offer access to millions of targeted individuals, it should be viewed as a tool for driving traffic to corporate owned sites such as.ORG and.COM where similar features could be incorporated and where you can guide the visitor experience in a way that creates a deeper more meaningful engagement between your business and the customers.

Establishing a close engagement with your customers through social Marketing, ensures your business truly understands what they want and need. Truly the easiest way to sell is to find out what your customers truly want and need, then offer it to them at a competitive price. The opportunities are boundless, with the right strategy, you can be making customers for life, every time you tweet.

Accountants that are using Social Media for business have either recognized and set specific goals that they expect to achieve, or at a minimum have anticipated general benefits that they feel they will realize from using it as a tool in their accounting firm. To find out if your strategy has been successful and is attaining the desired results you must quantify some things over time and measure your Return on Investment (ROI). So we now have to determine, is there an appropriate way of measuring the ROI of Social Media?

Business strategists say that everything that is done for and within the parameters of a business’s activity has to be measurable. Unless social media can be measured, its effectiveness as a business tool remains questionable. The argument for the measurement of everything, including social marketing expenditures, is that it provides a basis and a guide for decision makers whether or not to increase the budgetary requirements in the future. These statistics or measurements are used to calculate a “value” or perceived benefit that is being realized, your Return on Investment (ROI).

Wikipedia defines Return on Investment as: “The ratio of money gained or lost (whether realized or unrealized) on an investment relative to the amount of money invested.” Simply put, the definition of ROI is already in itself — a (1) RETURN on (2) INVESTMENT. But this definition is limiting because it is based purely on the assumption that there is an amount of money invested. Hence, the expected return is also an X amount of money.

In measuring the ROI in Social Media Marketing, assumptions can be easily skewed because there is no “monetary” investment, it is technically free. Does this mean that if there is no money “invested” that there is no tangible return to measure? The answer is no. The investment comes in a different form, your time. We can apply the same principles used to measure financial ROI to calculate the ROI of your non-monetary investments.

The first crucial step that every accounting firm must take is to set clear goals and expectations for their social media strategy. It will be difficult if not impossible to determine if you are making progress if you really have no idea of where you are going, or what you expect to achieve.

Baseline measurements must be obtained before you begin to track and monitor your progress. You must know where your accounting firm stands before you begin. Where are you today? You will be unable to measure your progress if you don’t know where you started.

In Social Media, a lot of your activities are based on human interactions and conversations on your firm’s Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn sites. These types of interactions are not easily measured. In this case your firm will need to rely on a variety of statistical tools to accumulate your “metrics”.

Being Accountants, we love to play with numbers. A quick tip: Metrics alone will not provide you with a clear ROI measurement. You will need to use the metrics to recognize the trends and correlate them to activities within your business. Some examples of trends that Accounting Firm Partners might want to look out for.

Example 1: Your Accounting Firm Partner’s Twitter page’s followers increased 100% from the previous month – did this correlate to an increase in inquiries for your Accounting Firm’s services?

Example 2: Are your fans or friends on your Facebook site proceeding to your Accounting Firm’s corporate website after checking you out on your Social Network? After which, how many new clients did you get?

In closing, remember that measuring the ROI of Social Media is unlike any other typical calculation. You must first begin with clear goals and expectations, and baseline measurements. While “metrics” are required, they are not the sole determination of success. These numbers must be used to determine trends and correlation of these trends to changes in your business. You will then be able to make informed decisions about adjustments to your strategy for the benefit of your accounting firm.

Do you want to learn how to use Twitter for social marketing? One of the guides that I have read that taught me how to do this is called Twitter Traffic Machine. It is one of the easiest and fastest to generate free traffic when done the right way.

However, there are many rules about social marketing that all marketers need to understanding before they start using Twitter for marketing purposes. Despite that, this site has great potential and more and more marketers are using this social marketing website’s huge potential to create lots of free traffic to their sites.

1. What I Have Learned by Using Twitter Traffic Machine

This system had taught me how to get massive traffic from the site through various ways. One of the ways is to get people to vote and syndicate your content. By getting people to link to your site, you can start getting more and more repeat traffic if your websites’ content is great.

2. Try Not to Make It Obvious If You Want to Sell Something

Sales pitches should not be done too often. You can provide a link to your sales pages on the site but make sure you do not sell too heavily. Selling too heavily is seen as a very rude activity and you should definitely not do it to your contacts.

3. Find More Business Relations on Twitter

You can describe your own business and build business relationships easily online on this social networking site. Many users of the site have reported that they were able to find business partners easily and have even found joint venture opportunities here.

As you can see, Twitter is a great place for social marketing as well as for building business relationships. You can learn many more strategies by reading Twitter Traffic Machine.