Kyle Reid Explains Exactly How KSI's Are Your Keys To Social Media ROI

By Kyle Reid

From the beginning, you should be checking the results of the different aspects of your campaign. Are users engaged? How long do site visits last? How much new content is spawning and about sponsorship returns? Analyzing these factors will give you a basic idea of your success.

Your network will only be as interesting as the people who are on it. You will want to attract and maintain the best possible contributors in your circle. Just because people visit your home page, it doesn't mean that they are being affected by what your site has to offer. If you find users are not engaged, find new ways of drawing them in and keeping them close.

Time on Site / Pageviews- This is an important statistic that varies widely across the competition. There are often benchmarks available for your industry (which can be found in google analytics). 10 pages per visit for example translates to roughly 4 minutes on the site per visit. Upon launch of your site or campaign you should be pleased to see 50% of the set benchmarks (i.e. 5 pages per visit and 2 minutes on average per visit). The expectation will be that these numbers can be doubled by Version 2.0 of the site once more community and networking features can be introduced.

How quickly is new content generated? Since the innovation of Social Media, people have a newfound power to add and share information. Take a good look at the frequency that new content is made.

This will be an important determinant in deciding how much research effort to allocate when breaking into a new geography or market segment for your Social Media activity. For example, if you launch in City A and it takes roughly 30 days to make it to 100% thanks to user contributions, then in future cases you can launch in a new city with fewer listings under the assumption that completing the list will be done quickly thanks to our users.

The amount you receive from your sponsors will vary whether your users spend a long time on partner sites or bounce right away. You can charge a higher CPM if the advertisements are contextually geared to your user base. Initially, you may want to be lenient towards sponsors if you are still growing. Just keep an eye on the impressions to fairly increase the CPM.

You may be interested in knowing that higher Cost Per Mille prices go along with niche-oriented sites compared with big all-purpose communities. Play this to your advantage if you are dealing with the former.

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