Finding your way through the haze of social media can be daunting and you may often you wonder “what am I getting out of it?” If you follow the steps below, we hope this should help you to improve your social networking and start seeing some return on investment.

1. Attract

- Create interesting blog posts and videos

- Have a content strategy

- Customise and brand your profiles to help build trust with your audience

- Be consistent to build credibility and expertise over time

- Become more active on Social Networks and Linked In groups

- Create links back to your website without being salesy

2. Retain

- Use targeted email marketing as well as social media

- Make it easy for someone to engage you in your social media activities from all the pages in your site

- Continue to engage with those that like, follow and subscribe on your website

- Make sure you always provide VALUE to your customer or they will unlike or unsubscribe

3. Convert

- Use social media as a lead generation tool for business

- Blogs and video work well with many companies to convert sales

- Give people an option to “buy” or fill out a form

4. Measure

- Use a tool such as the free Google Analytics to give you an insight into where your web traffic is coming from

- Use the free analytics plug-ins on Blogs, Facebook Insights and Youtube analytics to monitor engagements, clicks etc

- Use a URL shortener such as bit.ly to track all your URLs used in social media, blogs etc to see which get the most clicks

- Measuring the results of your social media activity is easy if you use some free and inexpensive tools to track traffic and conversions at your website.

We would love to hear from you – your comments, suggestions, what you find works for you or any questions you have so we can bring you more tips and tools. Simply connect via Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn or OpenID below and leave your comments.

About the Author: Karen Black is the Co-founder and Director of Mamba Media – a Creative Agency that specialises in Websites, Design and Digital Marketing for the Travel and Tourism Industry.