reinsurance girl's blog

I was just writing text for a slide about measuring the buzz of social media for a webinar I’m doing later this week for lawyers in the US, and I thought it would be good to share some of this information on this blog.

I’m presenting with the great Dan Gerber of US law firm Goldberg Segalla and we will be talking to several hundred corporate lawyers who specialise in insurance and reinsurance on the call through a slideshow on using social media for client development as part of a programme set up by the International Association of Defense Counsel.

Dan and I have presented a few times together now, and one of the things that we always talk about is measurability. I know I’ve talked about this before, but it is worth repeating: You need to measure how your social media strategy is working.

You need to measure it to:

• Keep you going – you will be amazed at how quickly the numbers rack up

• Prove to your organisation it works – and needs time and investment to keep it working

• Work out what works and what does not

• Find out who is listening to you – and listen back.

A free tool as simple as Google Analytics can show you just how successful your social media tools are. Having the goal of increasing hits to your website is a good starting point – and one that is easy to measure in terms of success. Knowing how many people visit your website before and after using social media can really make a difference. Brokers Guy Carpenter’s blog, GC Capital ideas, was so successful it registered 25,000 hits a month – and they knew exactly where every hit came from.

My blog has increased traffic to my website by twelve-fold. And I know where my readers are (I’m mostly read in the US and UK, but, more surprisingly, I have a big following in India and the Middle East), how long they stay for (average stay is 4 and a half minutes), where they click onto (usually the “people” page), and how they found me (mostly through posting this blog on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, but more and more through searches of key words). And I get all that information for free.

So, install Google Analytics and if you have a decent budget, team it up with some of the social media monitoring tools such as Meltwater News, Vocus, Radian6 and Cison – they will tell you a myriad of other stats as well  and be able to monitor what is being said about you and your company. This in turn will  let you target your message better at your core audience.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 12:41 pm and is filed under LinkedIn, blog, digital, facebook, reinsurance, social media, twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.