When establishing a search engine optimization campaign, many people find themselves wondering how much time or how much of their budget should be dedicated to social media optimization. It’s often said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it’s not a surprise that many smaller businesses attempt to emulate the success of industry giants. With this in mind, browsing through a social media platform like Facebook reveals that most major companies have established some form of social media presence.

So does this mean that you should jump on a computer ASAP and begin posting Facebook status updates as if your life depends on it? And, if you currently work with a search engine optimization company, does this mean that you should call them repeatedly, until they have established a Facebook page for your business?

Creating a LinkedIn company page should be an essential part of your social media strategy. By now, the importance of a social media presence is widely known; however, many people may not know where to spend their time and efforts, or feel as if their time and efforts are spread too thin over the various social media platforms. Whether you are tipping your toe in for the first time, or are trying to tread water in the social media pool, one thing is for sure— you must create a robust LinkedIn company page to be successful in any type of social media strategy you have developed.

Establishing Your Social Media Presence: LinkedIn Company Page Contents

In order to best establish your social media presence, you must become familiar with the contents of a robust LinkedIn page. LinkedIn company pages have four tabs, three of which are visible to users, and an analytics tab visible only to administrators of the company page.

I consider myself a heavy user of social media.  I am pretty well connected to the brands that I choose to give my money to, and I find that an effective social media campaign influences me to become more loyal because of the relationships that are built as a result of Twitter and Facebook.  Blogging, Tweeting and Facebooking (to name a few) are all great ways to build brand ambassadors and stay in touch with your customers.  But on the flip side, companies are often in such a hurry to climb on the social media bandwagon, they forget about the negative effects that their newfound social channels can have on customer satisfaction.

Although the marketing community as a whole can agree that social media can make a huge impact on many businesses, and can be a crucial piece of a company’s integrated marketing strategy, it is still extremely difficult to calculate ROI through social media monitoring.  It’s hard enough to use social media tracking to follow web buzz, much less analyze the influence that buzz may or may not have on sales, leads, or brand recognition.

Lucky for us, some innovative people have developed some excellent social media monitoring tools that marketers can use (for free!) to track their brand’s (and their competitors’ brands’) mentions, influence, and recognition across the social landscape.  Here are a few of my social media tracking favorites:

• Addictomatic – A search engine that aggregates content from across several sites, including YouTube, Twitter, Bing news, WordPress, etc.
• Facepinch – A search engine for public Facebook content.  Great way to see what people are saying about your brand, and also a good reminder of how much personal Facebook content is made public.
• Foller – Provides metrics about a specific Twitter account (yours or someone else’s, as long as the account isn’t private), including topics, hashtags, @mentions, and follower information.
• Heardable – This social media tracking tool assesses companies’ “brand effectiveness” across several metrics, including “Actionable” (ADA compliance, trust marks, user interface); “Measurable” (advertising & affiliate networks, optimization tools, web analytics); “Portable” (mobile device support, mobile advertising networks); “Searchable” (inbound links, indexed pages, local relevance, SEO); “Shareable” (API support, document sharing, RSS feeds, embedded video); and “Socialable” (Digg, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube).
• It’sTrending – A social media monitoring tool that provides a real-time feed of the most shared content on Facebook, broken out by medium (video, images, news, etc.)
• Mentionmap – Provides an infographic map of a given Twitter user’s connections, mentions, etc.  Kind of a visual “7 Degrees of Kevin Bacon” for Twitter.
• Metricly – Aggregates marketing campaigns (AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, Etsy, etc.) onto one dashboard.
• Snip-n-Tag – Shortens URLs plus adds a Google Analytics tracking tag.
• Twitter Sentiment – Allows for the tracking of sentiment for a brand, product or topic within Twitter.
• Twittrratr – Another sentiment-based social media tracking tool for Twitter.
• Whostalking – Another multi-platform social search engine.  This social media monitoring tool’s results aren’t presented as nicely as Addictomatic’s, but, unlike Addictomatic, this tool searches Facebook.

Obvious disclaimer here: because these social media tracking tools are free to use and executed by programming, they are by no means fool-proof.  Clearly, Heardable’s assessment of “brand effectiveness” is completely subjective, and, just like your great-aunt, “sentiment” social media monitoring tools can’t necessarily detect sarcasm.  That being said, these tools provide a good foundation for figuring out where your brand stands in the social media landscape, and where there is room to improve.

Quora is a new social media site where members can ask, answer and browse questions and responses about an infinite number of topics.  It started generating buzz at the end of 2010, and is currently valued around $86 million.

After a cursory overview of the site I couldn’t help asking, what’s the big deal about a site that, at first glance, appears to function as a re-invented Yahoo Answers?

It turns out Quora essentially answered that question itself in a post earlier this month entitled Commitment to Keeping Quora High Quality.  The post emphasizes the social media site’s commitment to quality content, and details its efforts to educate the influx of new members about posting standards and guidelines.

The post includes the following screenshot of Quora’s “tutorial quiz” for new members:

It seems that Quora is trying to separate itself from Yahoo Answers, which recently displayed the following questions on its home page:

• when i go to system restore it tells me i cant i need administrator i am the administrator?
• how willbe the future(mainlyhowmuchsallary) after full HardwareNetworking course from IIHT??
• can i email an attorney for an oppinion for free?

Despite Quora’s best efforts to maintain quality content, there is still skepticism that, as the social media site grows, the caliber of the Q&A site will drop.

In response to Quora’s growth, GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram wrote, “the site depends on high-quality answers, and has deliberately kept things small in order to cultivate a knowledgeable community.”

Quora was launched in early 2010 by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo and fellow Facebook alum Charlie Cheever, and until recently its content focused almost exclusively on the tech industry.  Remember Facebook in 2007, when college students were distressed to find high schoolers, professors, townies and (gasp!) their parents had invaded their exclusive social media site?  Tech Crunch editors and startup junkies are most likely experiencing a similar disgust at finding their “What are the advantages of opening a consumer internet startup in Israel?” discussion alongside “Why does my cat freak out after she poops?”

Personally, I am very interested to see how Quora handles the barrage of new users, both technologically and from a content perspective.  I am also interested to see if, as Quora grows, it follows in Facebook’s footsteps both as a social media site and on the advertising front as well (currently, self-promoting content is not allowed in Quora answers, and the site does not sell advertising opportunities at the moment).

In the meantime I’ll just browse Quora’s content – I’ve always wondered why soy milk isn’t green…