Doing Social Media On a Budget

Social media is one of the most effective ways to market online. While it is very cost effective, it still requires that you invest a solid budget into your campaign. Most marketers starting their social media campaigns don’t really know where they should be spending their money. As a result, they often use their money ineffectively and don’t get as much as they can out of their efforts.

1.) Advertising Budget

So in order to make use of your budget, you need to know about budget ceilings. The first budget you need to keep track of is your advertising budget. You need to think about how much you are going to spend advertising on sites like Facebook and Twitter. You can advertise on these sites but you need to make sure that you know how much you are spending and how much you’re getting back.

2.) Outreach Budget

The second budget ceiling to be aware of is how much you’re spending on your internal social media campaigns. That means the money you are spending on having people build you links from other bloggers, promoting on different social media sites, developing content, managing your forum/blog, etc. This is one of the things that will contribute most to your success from social media and also needs to be tracked.

3.) Capital Budget

The third and final budget ceiling is to figure out how to reinvest your money. You need to keep track of how much you are spending as well as your return on investment. Think about how you want to grow and come up with a good number to reinvest as capital. Make sure that it’s a number that will enable you to grow your campaigns at a steady rate while also not being too much that it eats away from your profits.

To make social media easy, there are many tools available to help you. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be expensive to use these tools. The main tools that you should focus on are analytic tools to help you accurately determine which social media sites your traffic is coming from and the statistics on each of your social platforms whether it’s your Twitter account or your Facebook page.

A free tool that you can use to get started in tracking your traffic sources is the QuickTagger tool. This tool analyzes the traffic sources on your social media sites which many tools have trouble doing. It is completely free and you can integrate it with Google Analytics to view your results.

There are more advanced and expensive tools but for many marketers, the QuickTagger app will be enough. You can try the QuickTagger app to get started in getting better analytics results and move on to others if you feel you need more advanced options. Visit this link to download the tool now:

http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/tools/quicktagger

Webmaster Tools Curator

Juliana is a web sleuth gathering marketing tools for all your webhosting needs. You can find her based in Los Angeles @InMotionHosting tweeting her latest findings to fellow bloggers on Twitter @JulianaP16.

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Posted on: May 3, 2012