When recently publishing the release of the article History of Tax - The British Monarchy and its Affect on Tax, as usual iCalculator published the tax article on Twitter and Facebook.
Despite iCalculators relatively new use of the social networks, both provided a combined visitors peak of a little over 100 visitors to iCalculator. Which this is of course still a relatively low number, it helps define why social networking has become so important to businesses and website owners around the world.
With a carefully developed social network, companies and websites are able to reach out and notify their network of new products and information instantly. In the days before Social networking, this type of traffic surge was driven by carefully written, Search Engine Optimised (SEO) articles which had to careful balance the flow of contact again keyword rich terms for the search engine.
Clearly SEO techniques remain important for the long life and sustainability of websites but social networking is clearly the medium for rapid information communication. Will this translate to greater dominance over traditional internet searching? Possibly, it will be interesting to see how the major sites and search engines develop the social path.
Google has already realised that social networking will transform the way we look at the internet and the way we search. Google Plus, although by no means a serious competitor with Facebook yet is gaining more fans and regular users.
So, how do you calculate the effectiveness of the social networks? Ultimately, social networks are just one part of the online strategy and whilst they deliver spikes in activity there use as a medium for driver continued, sustained traffic is limited without wider advertising and time investment.
A simple way to measure the success of your social networks to utilise Google Analytics/ Google analytics provides specific calculations (time, duration, number of visits, geographic and demographic data) for social networks and as you would expect has a number of bespoke element that can be refined to provide the perfect measure of a social networks success.