Social media has moved beyond being a tool for young individuals to share their private lives (pictures, messages) to fostering serious discussion on technology and business. Increasingly driven by regulatory pressures, the need “get it right the first time” and minimize costs remains a concern in the healthcare industry. Customer feedback to improve business has thus become very important. User generated content in the form of peer reviews on service/products often paves the way for businesses to understand any unique requirements as well as pain points of the existing services they provide.

Social media is making interactions between end users and service providers possible by providing relatively simple, easy to access (one can access social media even using a mobile phone) and unbiased platforms for sharing feedback. Little wonder then that many healthcare providers in the world are on social media such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs.

Download from eHealthNews.eu Portal’s mirror: Transforming Healthcare Through Social Media (.pdf, 801 KB).

Click here for full article.

Technorati Tags: health care social media, social media management, social media manager, social media training services, social media training videos

This is a very interesting topic to me because there are so many factors that come into play when trying to measure the revenue generated from social media marketing. Social media is all about relationship building and networking, and it’s strange to me to think about assigning a dollar and cents value to it. I’ve read dozens of articles on this topic, and it’s really fascinating.

Here at Bit Rebels, we don’t sell anything that costs money to our readers; however, we still compare the value of Twitter and Facebook in terms of pageviews and traffic on our website. I had a conversation with Richard about this today. Our pageviews generated from Twitter are almost three times as much as pageviews from Facebook. However, don’t let this fool you. There are other factors to consider. First of all, we have 5,300 Facebook fans, and a combined 150,000 Twitter followers. It’s not really comparing apples to apples when we look at the overall numbers.

So, instead, let’s look at the individual click-through rates (CTR). When looking at those numbers, there really is no comparison. There is a waaaaaay higher return from Facebook. There is about an 80% higher chance someone on Facebook will click on a Bit Rebels link than someone on Twitter. Why is that? From a personal standpoint, I’ve noticed the same thing. If I ask the same question at the same time on Twitter to my 38,000 followers and on Facebook to my 800 friends, I will almost always have more of a response on Facebook. Does it simply go back again to the relationship building aspect of it all? Do we simply have more of a bond with people on Facebook?
And then we get into all the sticky details about long-term loyalty. What about those Twitter followers who have been following you for a year and love to RT your content every day? Is there a different value placed on that RT than someone who just started following you yesterday? Also, what about the bots? You can tweet a link on Twitter and instantly have 30 bots and spiders clicking on it. If you use bit.ly, you’ll get more accurate results since they exclude bot clicks from the click results they provide.

There is just so much ambiguity and ways to go with this. In my opinion, quality is much more important than quantity, and assigning an accurate dollar amount to this might be close to impossible. Social Media Today recently published an article on this same topic. They referenced a company called Chompon who recently did extensive research about this as it relates to their own business. Their findings were absolutely fascinating, and I encourage you to download the PDF of their results. I put a screenshot of some of their results and methodology below for you to check out.

And then we get into all the sticky details about long-term loyalty. What about those Twitter followers who have been following you for a year and love to RT your content every day? Is there a different value placed on that RT than someone who just started following you yesterday? Also, what about the bots? You can tweet a link on Twitter and instantly have 30 bots and spiders clicking on it. If you use bit.ly, you’ll get more accurate results since they exclude bot clicks from the click results they provide.

There is just so much ambiguity and ways to go with this. In my opinion, quality is much more important than quantity, and assigning an accurate dollar amount to this might be close to impossible. Social Media Today recently published an article on this same topic. They referenced a company called Chompon who recently did extensive research about this as it relates to their own business. Their findings were absolutely fascinating, and I encourage you to download the PDF of their results. I put a screenshot of some of their results and methodology below for you to check out.

Eventbrite also did their own research on this topic in October of 2010. They found that their revenue (in ticket sales) come mostly from Facebook ($2.52), followed by LinkedIn (90 cents) and lastly from Twitter (43 cents).

I found three more very interesting articles on this topic. Two of them are on Fast Company. One is Twitter Crushing Facebook’s Click-Through Rate and the other is Fast Company’s view about the Eventbrite study. It is called Facebook Is Worth $2.52, Twitter Only 43 Cents. Brian Solis also wrote a great article on this called ROI: How To Measure Return on Investment in Social Media. Have you ever done any research on this topic yourself? What have you found? I would be very interested to read your take on it.

For more on this article by Author: Diana Adams

Technorati Tags: blanca peak technologies, kelly gerards, social media, social media marketing case study, social media marketing companies, social media marketing management, social media training videos, video marketing training

This is a topic that kept coming up over the past year with some clients: “What’s more important, getting my site
SEO’d, search engine optimized, so that I show up on the first page, or do I really need to put time and effort into
Social Media Marketing such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Video and Mobile Marketing?”

I ran across this industry article that makes things pretty clear on where things are now, and were things are going.
Social Media and SEO are playing major roles in how Google, Bing and other search engines are placing value on your
content and what you have to offer.

“With Internet users spending 25 percent of their time on social media sites – more time than on any other type of sites – search engine optimization and social media marketing are increasingly and inexorably intertwined.

As Internet users have changed their online behavior, search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing have become increasingly and inexorably intertwined. SEO leverages social media marketing to drive Internet users to a site. Social media marketing utilizes SEO techniques to connect with Internet users.

Writing for both ‘pincers’ of SEO and social media marketing is thus challenging. Nonetheless writing readable and appropriate content that is focused on keyword terms but not strewn with them is not that big a challenge. The key is informative and appropriate focused on keyword terms but not dominated by them. To the extent that challenge is met the social media profile of a company or website will be enhanced, and that enhancement will not only drive traffic from social networking sites, but it will also allow Internet marketers to double down with the increased weighting that ‘social factors’ have in determining Google and Bing’s SERPs.