With average position, you can get real information on where people are finding your domain in Google searches. No guessing based on scraped data, no hoping that people are searching in private mode in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle to get the least affected results possible.

Average position factors all of that information in and gives you a reasonable estimate of your organic opportunities.

But it can be a little trickier than the average tool to set up. Let’s break down exactly how to get GWT working in your account.

Prepare your GWT account

Fully authorizing Google Webmaster Tools in Raven is a two-step process. Before you open your Raven account, follow these steps to grant Raven access to your GWT account:

1. Navigate to google.com/webmasters and log into your Google account.
2. For the domain that you’re trying to authorize, click the Settings button and choose the Add or Remove Users option.
3. On this page, click Add a New User.
   
4. Enter gwt@raventools.com and give this new user restricted (not full) access.
   
5. Repeat for as many accounts as you plan to authorize

The reason why we ask for you to add Raven as a user on your websites in GWT is because we’re essentially exporting the Top Searches data as a user, then importing it into Raven for parsing. This is a process that is recommended by Google – we’re just taking advantage of the capabilities of automating the data collection.

If you’d prefer not to give Raven access in this way, you can still see data like crawl errors and related keywords by following the next steps. You just won’t be able to get Top Searches data.

Authorize your GWT account

Now that you’ve prepared your Google Webmaster Tools account for integrating with Raven, follow these instructions to pull all of your GWT data into Raven:

1. Log into your Raven account and navigate to Site > Webmaster.
2. On this page, add a new account if you haven’t added it already. Be sure to grant Raven access on the next page and name your new Google Account.

Once you’ve authorized your Google Account, your GWT account should automatically connect. Keep in mind that it can take about 10 minutes for Raven to pull data from Top Searches into your account.

That’s it! But, there are a couple of caveats to be aware of that can cause the authorization process to go awry.

A couple of caveats

• Google is very particular about verifying websites. Let’s say that we’ve added www.raventools.com to our Raven account, but verified raventools.com in our Google Webmaster Tools account. One would think that these two would see each other when authorizing GWT, but that isn’t the case. The websites in both Raven and GWT must have the exact same URL. Google recommends that you add both versions – with and without the www subdomain – to your account.
• When authorizing your Google Account, you may see a warning stating that the website has not registered with Google. Because Google registers websites on a domain by domain basis, it isn’t feasible to register every domain with their system – due in part to the custom domain features offered. Don’t worry, you can trust us.

That’s about it! If you have any questions or concerns, shoot us an email at support@raventools.com.

The post Did you know? How to authorize Google Webmaster Tools in Raven appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

But social media marketing isn’t just for big brands – far from it. While you’ll certainly find companies like Ford and Reebok engaged in marketing through Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, they’re not the only success stories.

In fact, it’s small business owners who likely have the most to gain from marketing their business via social networks. It’s a free (or at least cheap) and efficient way to build up your audience and share your message.

If you’re a small business owner trying to learn the ropes of successful social media marketing, here are some important tips to get you started.

Start with strategy

You would never start a traditional marketing campaign without a full strategy first, would you? You would need to know the initial costs, the potential returns for each marketing channel and the length of time it would take to see results.

The same thing applies to social media marketing. It’s essential that you have a strategy before you start engaging with your customers here. Your strategy might be low- or high-level, but it’s vital that you have one.

Engagement, not sales

On the surface, social media marketing seems pretty simple. You create an account, post updates about your products, services or company growth and reap the rewards.

Not so fast. In order to see success, think about your audience first. How can you create and share the kind of stuff they’re going to love? Social media marketing require that you do more than just post endless updates plugging your products. Engagement is the key factor here, and that requires more than just pushing your sales pitch.

Quality over quantity

Social media is ideal for creating a person-to-person conversation, even between a business and its customers. The most important thing to remember here is that quality trumps quantity every time.

You can post 15 updates a day and not see a single benefit, but just one quality post that your followers actually want to share can provide substantial traffic to your site or location.

Moreover, posting too often (and posting the wrong things) can lead to people perceiving you as a spammer, which is not something you can afford.

Know your goals

Goal setting should be part of your initial strategy development and planning, but you must also ensure that those goals are measurable and attainable (SMART goal setting can help here).

What goals might you set? It depends on the social media metrics that matter to your brand.

You could set a goal to get a certain level of audience reach within the next three months. You might set a goal of increasing social referral traffic by a certain percentage, or you might choose to focus on conversions. Regardless, make sure that your social media goals mesh with your overall business goals.

Be responsive

Providing great customer service on social media is one of the most foolproof ways to win the goodwill of your customers and community. That means responding to the questions and comments of your followers – whether they’re posting directly to your Facebook wall, mentioning you on Twitter or commenting on one of your blog posts.

Not only is this polite, but it gives you the chance to engage in further conversation, root out problems, improve customer service, get new product ideas and much more. Always be responsive no matter what social network you’re using. You may want to look into a social media monitoring solution to make sure you’re not missing any mentions.

Avoid self-promotion

The temptation for business owners in social media is to blast out a stream of endless self-promotion – why else did you sign up if not to promote your business, right? But playing it cool – although it seems counterintuitive – will net you a better result.

Overdoing it on the self-promotion creates a one-way street where you’re talking at your customers instead of to them. While you can post news about your company, products or services, limit this content to about 20 percent of your overall posts as a general rule.

Destination counts

Generally, your social media marketing efforts will be geared to getting your followers to visit your website and eventually become customers. However, for this to work, your destination needs to match the promises you make.

No matter how effective your social media message might be, if your website or blog is lacking in design, quality content and other important features, you can expect your followers to be unimpressed. So continue the goodwill you started with social media and make sure your site has amazing content, easy-to-understand navigation and optimization that values humans, not robots, first.

What tips have helped you use social media effectively and grow your business? Share them with me in the comments.

The post Social media success tips for small businesses appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

That’s why we’ve enhanced your options to get alerts to your Raven inbox.

Not only have we updated our existing alerts for link monitoring and social media monitoring, we’ve also added enhanced alerts for Site Auditor and will soon be adding Site Performance and Dashboard alerts.

Here’s what’s new and on the way.

Updated link monitoring and social monitoring alerts

From the Link Manager, you can activate link monitoring alerts for a whole host of options. For example, if you are running a link building campaign and want to know when a link you’re working on goes active, Raven pops a little note into your inbox to tell you that.

Alerts for Social Monitor let you know when terms you are monitoring have had mentions.

But previously, these alerts were text-based and hard to sift through. Now, everything is organized and easy to digest, so you can quickly act on the things that are the most urgent.

Enhanced Site Auditor alerts

Already one of Raven’s most robust tools, Site Auditor is now even more indispensable with the addition of info-packed emails sent to your inbox every time a crawl is run.

Get alerted to any changes that have been detected for your website and get right to work – the email’s got everything you need to get going.

In Site Auditor, you have an option to run crawls monthly, weekly, or manually as you need them. You’ll get an alert email every time Raven crawls your site, so you’ll be able to see changes over time as multiple crawls are run.

If you automate a crawl monthly or weekly, you’ll get an email alert any time a crawl has completed.

If you set up Site Auditor to run manual crawls on command, you’ll receive these alerts once the crawl has been completed. Having the changes over time sent right to your inbox is a quick and easy reminder that there are still on-site issues that need some attention.

In the sneak peek category, get a look at our upcoming alerts for Site Performance and Dashboards.

On the way: Site Performance alerts

Imagine having an update in your inbox every two weeks that tells you how your website is performing in more than 20 different internet marketing metrics, and notes change over time on all those metrics.

Site Performance updates automatically every two weeks, so when you turn on these alerts, you’ll get them automatically.

Coming soon: Dashboard alerts

I know lots of you will be even more excited about our upcoming Dashboard alerts. Triggered at an interval of your choosing (daily, weekly or monthly), the Dashboard alert will mimic the exact view you have set up in the individual site’s Dashboard.

This is just the tip of the iceberg – there are so many directions we hope to go from here in terms of alerts. What would you most like to see?

As always, we love to hear your feedback.

The post Feature update: Actionable alerts on links, site changes and more appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

If you are responsible for even more than one client, it’s probably not unusual for you to find yourself in a time crunch to produce the amount of content you need to keep everyone happy.

That’s where Raven comes in. Our integration with the content firm Textbroker is here to help you get your hands on all the quality content you need to keep up with your workload.

At a glance

Raven integration: Textbroker
Category: Content
What it does: Writers are at your disposal to assist you in producing content on a myriad of topics.
Where you’ll find it: Content > Textbroker
What else it connects to: Review, edit and publish content directly from Textbroker to any WordPress-powered blog via Raven’s Blog Manager.

Get to know Textbroker

Textbroker employs a bevy of qualified writers to assist you in content production on just about any topic you might need. The content producers are all located in the United States, and Textbroker verifies all produced content to ensure it is completely original.

Get started with Textbroker

To use the Textbroker service integrated within Raven, you’ll first need to request Textbroker access. Since Textbroker is an add-on service to your Raven account, we do this simply to protect everyone from credit card fraud. Just navigate to Content > Textbroker, and you’ll see how to start the process.

Once you’ve been granted Textbroker access, you can order content anytime. Just click on Order Article in the Textbroker section, and you’ll be taken to an order form where you can fill in details about the article you want, including specifying content category, title, word count, keywords and more.

After you place your order, it is placed into a pool for a Textbroker author to pick up. Once an author picks up your request, they have 24 hours to submit it for your review. You can follow along in the status column of the table to see the progress of your article (see all the status types and their definitions here in our Knowledge Base).

After an article is delivered from the Textbroker author, it will be available in the Content Manager, where you can run a Scribe analysis, make any edits and send it to the Blog Manager for publishing.

Good to know

Textbroker content is not included in your monthly Raven fee, but an additional cost billed along with your monthly Raven invoice.

The fee per article depends on the word count you’ve specified, and your estimated total will display before you order the content so there are no surprises.

Previously in Raven’s data partner and integration spotlight

• Quick and easy blog management with WordPress
• Social media monitoring and management with Twitter
• Scribe content analysis
• Majestic SEO data
• uberVU social media intelligence
• Google Webmaster Tools SEO and site data

The post Raven integration spotlight: Order quality content from Textbroker appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

If you have ever taken a Cosmo quiz about your flirting skills, you know how this works. For every question, choose one answer. Add your points for each answer together. Score yourself at the end.

1. I use numbers at the beginning of headlines:

• Never. How pedestrian. +10
• Sometimes. Better traffic and more social shares and more links, duh. +5
• Often. It’s so much easier to write when I know exactly how many paragraphs I need. +1

2. I use memes to illustrate my content:

• Never. I have All Original Content. +10
• Sometimes. When it makes sense. Probably in the past few months. +5
• Meme ALL the things! #winning. One does not simply stop marketing with memes. +1

3. I use multimedia content formats, such as podcasts, webinars and videos:

• Never. All I need are written words. +10
• Sometimes. A few webinars and podcasts, because they work for email harvesting content marketing. (Plus, I like to hear the sound of my voice in recordings. My voice is like the voice baby of Barry White and Luther Vandross.) +5
• Often. Mostly cat videos. +1

4. I compare Celebrity X to Topic Y:

• Never. All Original Content is incomparable. +10
• Sometimes. So Eminem resonates with my aging audience of marketers in their second careers. Who am I to judge? I’m waiting for the right time to use Burt Reynolds. +5
• Often. Especially if the celebrity is long dead, because Einstein and Nietzsche can’t sue me. Although if the celebrity just died, I can be poignant about Topic Y in the context of Our Brief Lives. +1

5. I use GIFs to illustrate my content:

• Never. People who love GIFs now weren’t even born when I was busy inventing websites with them. +10
• Sometimes. I used a bunch of GIFs to illustrate an article about how to use GIFs for marketing. +5
• Often. In fact, I’m taking it a step past GIFs into marketing with cinemagraphs. If someone can write a New York Times article about the significance of GIFs that concludes with…
  

  “The GIF,” he said, “occupies very fertile ground between the still and the moving image.”

  …then I don’t really see the problem. +1

6. I use infographics:

• Never. I have All Original Content best expressed as a long-form narrative. +10
• Sometimes. But I hear charticles are next big thing for Thought Leadership Marketing Content. +5
• Often. It’s not like an infographic needs to have data to be an infographic—just some decorated words that people will share. +1

7. I make lists:

• Never. I write the stuff that other people make lists about. +10
• Sometimes. Best-of lists are good for links. End-of-the-year or year-ahead lists are OK if I have nothing better. +5
• Often. I have even made lists of my lists. +1

8. I have used “…is king” or “…is dead” in my copy:

• Never. But if I did, I would have been the first person to say it ever. +10
• Sometimes. But only as a way to disprove that something “is king” or “is dead” and that really shouldn’t count against me. +5
• Often. But only in word clouds. +1

9. I have started an article with a dictionary definition:

• Never. I never quote anyone, even the dictionary. +10
• Sometimes. I know, I know. It’s a writing crutch. But sometimes I’m in a hurry. +5
• Often. Every time I have to look up a word in the dictionary, I think, “That’s a blog post!” If Webster explains something, then I don’t have to. +1

10. I read, watch or listen to other works of art and their creators:

• Never. That’s how I know my content is so original. +10
• Sometimes. I do have to keep up with industry news, but what really triggers my best content has nothing to do with my job. Music, photography, architecture, XBOX, Duck Dynasty, Tarantino movies. That kind of thing. +5
• Often. I haven’t read a novel in years, but I read Seth Godin’s blog every day. +1

How original is your content?

100 points

Your content is so original you probably passed along some ideas to Moses. Then you wrote The Epic of Gilgamesh. Homer, Plato and Socrates have nothing on your creativity. You coined marketable before Shakespeare did. Among some scholars, there are whispers that you are Shakespeare.

30-99 points

You’re the average content marketer. You’ll try most things once and keep doing the things that are working. When they stop working, you move on to the next thing someone is calling a best practice. But… are you OK with average? Would you rather be the person setting the content trends? Pump it up! (Try a quiz.)

10-30 points

You are the content marketer who takes a good thing and uses it over and over and over until even your mother knows about the ALL THE THINGS meme. It’s possible that you are terrible at your job, but it’s also possible that you don’t know what you’re doing is overkill. Consider this a head’s up.

0-10

It’s not possible to score below 10 if you followed the quiz instructions. Are you a content maverick in the making?

Cuneiform photo by Kurt Thomas Hunt.

The post Do you have original content? Take the quiz. appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

Create a new list, or add folks to an existing one – all while working in Raven. Here’s how.

Create a Twitter list

1. Go to Social > Twitter and connect an account if you haven’t already.

2. Click Lists from the menu on the left.

3. From here, we’ll show you any existing lists that are associated with this account. Click the Create List button.

4. Now give your new list a name and description. By default, your list will be public on Twitter, but simply switch the toggle to Private if you want to create a list only you can see. Click Submit.

That’s it! Your list is now live.

Now, here’s how to add someone to an existing Twitter list.

Add a user to Your Twitter list

1. From the Twitter tool, select “Add or remove from lists…” from the gear icon next to a tweet..

2. Select the list(s) to which you want to add the user and click Submit.

3. To view your lists, just click Lists from the menu on the left.

You may also want to learn about creating Twitter searches in Raven – another convenient feature.

Enjoy this handy feature to help build relationships while you’re working on other tasks in Raven!

The post Did you know? Create Twitter lists in Raven appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

The SEO strategies that win today – creating high-quality content, focusing on the metrics that matter to clients and investing in digital PR – are often far different than what’s come before them.

Next-level marketers and SEOs know what it takes to be successful today, but convincing the powers that be within a business or organization can be challenging.

You may encounter leaders who are set in their ways, marketers who are clinging to tactics that are no longer effective, or bosses who have been led astray by out-of-date opinions and resources.

But don’t despair – you can get them to come around to you way of thinking with a little finesse. Here are three big-picture philosophies and strategies that work now, and the tips you need for getting leaders’ buy-in to implement them.

1. Give away your knowledge for free

Businesses and organizations who are seen as experts in their field all have one thing in common: they are prolific publishers of helpful, brand-agnostic content. This means that they aren’t constantly publishing whitepapers about their own products and services, but rather giving away all of their thought leadership in an effort to show off their expertise.

The result is rapid community growth, which leads to increased social shares and backlinks.

For some industries, giving away all of your intellectual property can be a tough pill to swallow, especially in those verticals where intellectual property and employee knowledge is a key differentiating factor that isn’t unveiled until a prospect becomes a customer.

To win today, companies have to let their guard down and embrace the fact that Internet users are looking for answers to questions, and won’t even consider hiring a vendor until they know for sure that they are truly experts.

A great example of this is from the agency SEER Interactive, which recently published a mammoth (un-gated) article on their site that the author says took more than 60 hours to complete. This “Guide to Doing Almost Anything” with the tool Screaming Frog has dominated the social conversation since its publication, and will likely appear in search results for the foreseeable future.

A few years ago it might have been considered crazy to give away this kind of knowledge for free, for fear that prospects would simply “do it themselves” rather than retain your business.

What to say:

“Everyone is becoming a publisher. If prospects don’t get content that is easily accessible, educational and authoritative from us, they’ll get it from a competitor.”

2. Choose the right metrics

Rankings have long been the reigning KPI for SEOs and web marketers. But with so many other sources of referral traffic available to business and organizations, rankings are no longer king.

In fact, first page rankings can lull some marketers into a false sense of accomplishment, or may simply be a result of poor content and suspect link building.

Instead, focus on the metrics that matter. Conversions are an ideal KPI because they allow marketers to tie their efforts directly to the company’s bottom line.

If you can point to increased conversions regardless of rankings, there’s a good chance you’re doing something right. Plus, you can avoid the dreaded supervisor question: “Our rankings are up, why aren’t sales?”

What to say:

“As long as traffic and conversions increase, why does it matter where we rank?”

3. Earned media is the new link

Not only will businesses and organizations need to become publishers, but they’ll also have to start adopting traditional PR tactics to get their content placed on leading online media outlets.

This means a concerted effort to build relationships with reporters and gatekeepers of major online publications, which will require the inclusion of skilled publicists and editors within the marketing department who will go out and earn marketing, rather than pay for it.

A “content czar” who oversees the quality of all outgoing content may also be appropriate.

Once the relationship is made, these leading blogs, journals and communities can funnel traffic to your content in volumes never thought possible.

Adding significant headcount of this nature to a traditional marketing department may come off as strange to leadership, but it truly represents the marketing department of tomorrow.

What to say:

“The best marketing is earned! Let’s put a team in place who can secure placements with leading media outlets that won’t be able to resist featuring our content.”

With these three talking points, you should be able to convince even the most stubborn executive to let go of outdated strategies and start focusing on the SEO strategies that win today.

Have you struggled with convincing a supervisor to employ a marketing tactic you knew would be successful? How did you handle it? Let me know in the comments below.

Photo Credit: Rob Gallop via Compfight cc

The post Old SEO, meet new SEO: How to get buy-in for modern marketing appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

The reality is that no matter how amazing your webmaster is, there’s a 99.9% chance your site will still have some problems.

Visibility is usually at the top of the list, followed by missing, incomplete or broken copy, links and images.

Ignoring a site audit can mean leaving a lot of money on the table when it comes to site traffic and conversions.

That’s why we created our Site Auditor – so you can look like a hero when you find and fix significant site problems. Here’s everything you need to know to use Raven’s Site Auditor to audit like a boss.

Detect visibility problems

The first thing our Site Auditor checks for are visibility problems – i.e., can a search engine crawl through your site and discover content? You’ll get a tally of all page errors, blocked pages, redirects and malware.

Optimize meta data

Meta data is easy to miss because it’s invisible when viewing a page in a browser, but it’s very important to search engines because it directly affects visibility.

If you’ve duplicated it, forgotten it or haven’t spent the time to optimize it, your site will suffer the consequences.

Site Auditor checks for page titles and meta descriptions – if they’re missing or duplicated, and, if they exist, if they’re too long or too short. In addition, it checks to make sure you didn’t forget to put your Google Analytics tracking code on the page.

Fix duplicate and shallow content

Duplicate content won’t ruin a site, but it’s not ideal, because you’re entrusting search engines to pick which page to display in the SERPs. You can use canonical tags to help steer search engines in the right direction, but it’s best to have unique content on each page of your site.

Raven’s Site Auditor finds and reports on pages that have duplicate content.

It also checks for pages with a low word count (250 words or less), which can be interpreted by search engines as irrelevant or low quality pages.

Find broken and non-optimized internal and external links

Broken links – internal and external – suck for users. And if there are enough of them, it can send a low-quality signal to search engines that affect how visible your site is in the SERPs.

Site Auditor checks both text and image links, and reports if they are broken, and if they are missing anchor text or descriptive ALT text. It also reports on links that use rel=”nofollow”.

Optimize images for search engines

Images are often ignored by webmasters, but optimized images can significantly increase site traffic.

The Site Auditor checks every image to make sure it has ALT text and title text. It also reports on any images that are broken or missing.

Detect and identify semantic data

Headings like H1 and H2 help provide semantic context for site content to both human visitors and search engine bots.

Schema.org does something similar, except that it uses structured data called microdata to communicate complex types of data. For example, schema.org microdata can be used to communicate events, recipes or a company’s contact details. Using schema.org microdata can produce rich snippets that help your site perform better in the SERPs.

Raven’s Site Auditor detects the presence or absence of headings, and also detects and identifies Schema.org microdata.

Test page speed

A faster site can result in increased engagement and conversions. It’s also a ranking factor for Google.

Site Auditor tests your homepage and provides a comprehensive page speed report to help fix speed problems.

Report results to managers and clients

To do a site audit like a boss, you’ll need to hand a professional looking report to your manager or client. Raven makes doing that incredibly easy. With one click, you can create a PDF report summary of all of the site issues you found.

You can also create detailed reports from any section.

If there are items you don’t want to report on, you can add reporting exceptions in the Site Auditor settings.

Automate crawl and compare results over time

It’s a very good practice to keep crawling and analyzing your site on a regular basis. Otherwise, you may miss a serious visibility or malware problem.

Raven’s Site Auditor allows you to check your site automatically every week or month. It saves high level results from previous crawls, so you can see and report on changes and improvements over time. It also alerts you to new problems.

Put the sauce in awesomesauce

How does one achieve true SEO awesomesauce? By including a Site Performance report with your Site Auditor report.

Combining these two site monitoring reports gives you even more useful data for benchmarking and site maintenance. The combo is perfect for new business proposals – and ongoing reporting after you’ve won the business.

If you don’t use Raven yet, we offer a free 30-day trial that will let you try out both Site Auditor and Site Performance. What are you waiting for? Create an account, already!

The post How to do an SEO site audit like a boss appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

This feature allowed me to simply manage the 40+ blogs I was responsible for. I didn’t have to remember all the usernames and passwords for each account. All I had to do was choose my website and profile within Raven and publish to all of those blogs in one place.

Today, Raven’s WordPress integration gives all of our customers that same value: An easy way to publish to as many WordPress blogs as you need. (OK, a lot more value, actually: You can order quality content with Textbroker, test your content with Scribe…)

Here’s what you need to know about Raven’s integration with WordPress.

At a glance

Data integration: WordPress
Category: Content
What it does: Allows users to quickly publish blog content.
Where you’ll find it: Content > Blog Manager
What else it connects to: Analyze content with Scribe in the Content Manager, then send posts directly to integrated WordPress blogs.

Get to know WordPress

Open source software at its core, WordPress allows anyone to manage the content on a website. Coupled with thousands of plugins, WordPress allows just about anyone to get a complete website up and running and manage it with ease.

Get started with WordPress

To connect your WordPress blog to Raven, navigate to Content > Blog Manager. Click the “Add Blog” button in the top right corner to start the process of adding your blog. In the first pop-up window, add the full URL of the blog. In the next, you’ll be able to add more details, such as the username and password for the blog.

If you want to limit access to the blog to just the admins of your Raven account, you can do that. Or you can make the blog accessible across your entire Raven account.

Once done, you’ll be taken back to a table where you can see all of the blog’s draft and previously published posts.

To add a new post, just click on the “Add Post” button in the top right of the table. From there, you’ll be taken to a simple WYSIWYG editor where you can add any content you would like to the blog in question. You can publish right way, or schedule a post date and time of your choosing.

Once you publish a new piece of content, you’ll be returned to the table with all of your previous blog posts. You can add a new post, add a new blog, or edit the settings right from the same page.

Good to know

You can add an unlimited number of WordPress blogs to Raven, so take advantage of the ultimate way to keep all your content organized in one place.

Previously in Raven’s data partner and integration spotlight

• Social media monitoring and management with Twitter
• Scribe content analysis
• Majestic SEO data
• uberVU social media intelligence
• Google Webmaster Tools SEO and site data

The post Raven integration spotlight: Manage blogs easily with WordPress appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

It’s not that we can’t show off some hard numbers when someone asks us that dreaded question.

On the contrary, we’re pretty much drowning in data, resources and how-tos.

The best social media metrics, the worst social media metrics, how to determine social media ROI, why you can’t determine social media ROI: I’ve read all these posts and more. (Hell, I’ve even written some.) 99 percent of them were the opposite of helpful.

They’re noise.

They get us all in our heads, and then they get us to give up when we can’t find the perfect tool, or have one frustrating conversation with a client.

There’s only one question that matters

All this back-and-forth only obfuscates the real question we all want and need to be able to answer: Is social media worth it?

That’s what we really want to know, right? Are we getting enough out of it to make all this worthwhile?

Now, the answer to this question may or may not follow the traditional formula for ROI, some nitpickers will undoubtedly point out.

This matters exactly zero. If you can prove that social media is worth it to your boss, to your client, to yourself – whatever that looks like – and keep doing it month after month, you’re golden.

You CAN measure it

And here’s the thing. Spending the past month waist-deep in social media metrics to write Raven’s new resource, 30 Social Media Metrics That Prove Real Value, has taught me one very important thing: You can measure anything if you want it bad enough.

Yes, it might be time consuming. Yes, there are a million different metrics you might want to measure. No, you probably won’t find a tool that lets you just push a button to produce a magic number. That’s good. Do it the hard way first and earn your metrics.

Earn your metrics and you’ll know how you got there – and where to go.

Earn your metrics and you can to put them in the right context.

Earn your metrics and you can present them with total confidence.

The definitive guide to measuring social media

So here’s my foolproof formula for answering The One Big Question: Is social media worth it?

Step 1. Reboot
Forget the social media ninjas, gurus, sherpas and experts. Forget what you’ve read. Ignore almost everything on the Internet (um, not this, of course). Don’t search or click on articles on topics like “social media ROI” or even “social media measurement.”

Step 2. Communicate
Talk to your boss or client about what social media can and should accomplish for your brand. Is social media the introduction, the deal-closer or something else altogether?

Really talk. Nothing is too big or too small to put on the table, and there are no “bad” metrics.

Maybe it’s customer service. Maybe it’s reputation management. Maybe it’s traffic to a website or a physical location. Maybe it’s sales. What element of social media, or combination of elements will answer The One Big Question?

Step 3. Measure
Figure out how to measure just those things. No more, no less. No second guessing.

It may take some research, a fair amount of trial and error, and maybe a refresher course on fractions and percentages – but it can be done.

We can help

Whatever you want to measure, chances are it’s covered in Raven’s guide, 30 Social Media Metrics That Prove Real Value. I researched it and wrote it right from the trenches of day-to-day social media marketing. Download it and let me know what you think.

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