Carving up the social media budget - Pie Analogy

One of the challenges faced by everyone involved in marketing, branding and PR is measurement. Usually, companies have a number of activities ongoing at the same time - a comprehensive advertising schedule, marketing campaign, PR and social media campaigns. Each department is often fighting for a bigger slice of the budget so how do they prove their worth?

Often, qualitative research before and after a campaign is the only way to know if your particular communication tool of choice is pulling its weight. That's why we're all slaves to website traffic, click throughs and referrals these days.

I set up my blog and twitter around the same time (with my addiction to Quora following soon after) and it's really been a revalation how these things feed into each other. The stats and analysis you get on even the most basic of social media tools is fantastic - where are your visitors clicking through from, which are your most popular posts and what topics get the most traction with visitors.

I'm a little bit too new at this to go showing my hand but I'm very happy to see people DO click through on my twitter links and that I was right - Quora is driving traffic to my blog. One amateur blogger does not a complete research report make but I'll be watching my stats counter with an eagle eye from now on.