Using Social Media Information The Way It Was Meant To Be Used
Posted by Beth Hrusch
There is a lot of social media information out there, and that's putting it mildly. The number of social media users has doubled since 2007 and some experts think a billion people could be using social media by 2012, even though two years is an eon in social media terms.
Each one of these users, real or imagined, leaves behind a trail of information as 
they Tweet, update, post, and Digg, to name a few. Hundreds of millions of users means the same number of trails. It's enough to make your head spin.
Using social media information effectively doesn't need to be an arduous process, however. There are some basic things you can do to learn a lot about who is doing what out there. For example, according to a recent study, people spend, on average, seven times as much time on Facebook than on Twitter. Which do you think is more effective for gathering information?
Audience is another consideration. Are there a lot of wealthy, middle-aged doctors and lawyers on Myspace? Probably not. Targeted advertising used to be easy. Men like beer and watch football; women buy soap and watch daytime TV. But no more. Social media is forcing even more intensely segmented markets to emerge.
Google Analytics is one way to use this information. It tells webmasters who's visiting, where they came from, what they did, and how long they stayed. Plus it offers sophisticated information on how money invested is being returned in the form of traffic.
Facebook still stubbornly refuses to let users see who visits their page and how frequently, but the Pages feature that allows people to be "Fans" of products has been successful in offering companies another way to look at their markets.
It's definitely tough to corral all of the social media information out there, but there are efficient ways to use it productively. Starting broadly and working toward specifics with good tools is definitely the way to go.