Warren Dell

Social media has become such an important part of the digital marketing mix that with so much time spent on the medium it’s important that you are able to report back to your client or colleagues how your campaigns are performing.

You may have 60,000 followers on Twitter but if this isn’t resulting in increasing your traffic you need to see why. I’ll be looking at that in part two but for now I’m going to show you how you can set up Google Analytics to work for you and track in one place how your social media is performing in relation to your other traffic sources – direct, search and other referring sites.
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(UPDATE)

Since publishing this post The Manchester Evening News report on the story has confirmed that United’s neighbours and rivals Manchester City have also advised their players not to set up social networking pages.

Manchester United football club have banned their players from maintaining social network profiles on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Twitter accounts held by players Darren Fletcher, Wayne Rooney and Ryan Giggs were all removed, as revealed by football blog EPL Talk. Ryan Giggs also had content removed from his Facebook page as well as team mate Rio Ferdinand.

The football club may have done this to make sure traffic that they feel should be coming to their website isn’t aimed elsewhere and missing out on revenue opportunities.  Although there are literally thousands of fan created sites around out of their control so it seems that they are doing this to protect themselves from any comments from their players getting them in trouble as has already happened in the sporting world.

With many incidents causing teams to punish or ban permanently players from using social networking sites this won’t be the last time professional sports and social media will collide. Read the rest for my favourite incidents where sports teams have put their foot down over social networking or a star player has landed himself in a bit of bother.
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People behind any new social media tool after wowing people inevitably have to ask themselves the question, “How can we make money from this?” It was a question asked by people about Youtube and Myspace and since it’s popularity increased on a massive scale, Twitter. They recently announced deals with Google and Bing to share Tweets on their website which they say make the micro-blogging tool profitable. But many people are asking how they can make Twitter pay for them.  Twitpic, allows users to upload photos with their Tweets is one company who recently turned a profit and has received between $1.5 and $2million in advertising revenue.  But how can others replicate this success?  Two recent articles caught my eye on this in the last couple of days which are worth reading.

Startups cash in on Twitter with pay-per-tweet from the San Franscisco Chronicle

How small newspapers can make money from Twitter from Econsultancy