As business folks online, we’ve been hearing over the past couple of years that social media is the hot ticket and that we should get involved in a big way. Well… How big? And if you do, how do you know if what you’re doing is working? Are you spending too much time or too little time tweeting or Facebooking? (Yes, I made that up. Like it?) Are you getting any results?

By results, I mean are people subscribing to your list and/or are you making sales? This is HUGE! Not every social platform will work the same for every business. For example, a business might have success when they bookmark their blog posts at Reddit.com. Or, maybe your Tweeting is working to grab folks attention and get them over to your blog. And then, perhaps you have a fan page at Facebook that is driving sales. Do you know? And if you don’t, want to know how you can tell?

Figuring this out takes a short while to set up, but it’s not terribly difficult, and here’s the good news… You can get these stats free! No matter what type of web page you’re working with from a squeeze page to a blog, you can get this metric from Google Analytics. It’s important to not just add Analytics to your page, but also to set goals and to add the appropriate codes to pages in your funnel, as well.

So, goal one is that visitors opt in. Goal two would be a sale to that customer. Google will then display the results of your funnel, so this is a very easy way to tell what’s working for your site. You can set up to five goals, but make sure that you’re setting goals that will provide information that’s important. You may want to start with your front door, move to your optin, then on to your sales, your up sales, and your down sales. It’s really up to you. But for this article, we’re testing social platforms, so here’s what you do:

Set up a Custom Report, which will allow you to walk with your customer from the time they click the link that brings them to your page to when they buy your product.You do this from the results area, where you see stats for your site. Go to the bottom of the left-side navigation and you’ll see “Custom Reporting.” At the upper right-hand corner, click “Create new custom report.”

Start with the “Metric,” and click the drop down arrow.  Select “Goal 1 starts,” and drag it over to the dotted blue square area labeled “Metric.” (It’s tough getting it in there, if you don’t realize that you put the cross arrow into the blank box until it highlights the outline and then, drop the label into it.)
Then, give your goal a “Dimension” by clicking the drop-down for “Traffic Sources” and select “referral path.” Drag that over beside the green dotted area that says, “Dimension.”

Save your report and it will tell you how many optins you got from what source, and voila!  Finally, you get an idea of how many people successfully opted in and where they came from.

Then, above the Metrics area, select “+Add Tab,” and follow the same route to track sales and where they came from. Add Goal 2 as your metric. It should be the download page for your product. Then, add the dimension, referral path. That result will tell you how many sales you made and where those came from. Sweet!

After that, it’s a no-brainer, right? Decide which social sites are bringing the best results. Concentrate on those and ignore the rest, and you’ll see greater success. You can’t possibly join or participate in every one of them, so be sure to decide which ones make the most sense instead of spinning your wheels. That makes no sense at all.

There is no denying that Social Media has been a huge factor in Driving Traffic to websites. Then it moved into a great tool to help new content become indexed on Search Engines.Building social communities and providing quality content in these social circles will build friends, drive traffic, build authority and now even effect rankings!

Listen to what Google’s Matt Cutts has to say below:

Video Lesson #12 – How to use Widgets in WordPress

You Can Opt Out Of Applications

Facebook has now introduced a button for users to opt out from the entire Facebook Platform. That means you can block all applications, games, etc. While developers will probably not be happy about this, this means users no longer have to deal with application requests, as well as spam on their wall from applications. That means the more that developers spam, the more likely users will opt-out of the Facebook Platform all together.

You Can Hide Your Friends List

One major upgrade is that users’ friends lists can now be made private. That means applications and other third-party developers will not be able to find out who your friends are. Additionally, all friends can be made private which means anybody who found your Facebook profile through Google can be prevented from finding out who your friends are. This is a major move by Facebook in terms of giving users more control.

You Can Hide Your Interests

Facebook’s interests were recently shifted to a system called “Connections”. That means those interests were essentially made public when the new community pages first rolled out in April can now be made private. This is a huge win for users who suddenly found out that a large percentage of their profile

Much Information Is Still Public By Default

When users register for the site, it appears that a lot of information will still be public by default. This is different than the more private nature of the site, which Facebook started as. However, all new users will be able to customize their privacy settings and make their information more private. Facebook believes that more users want to share more information about themselves, as society becomes more transparent, and as such their default settings reflect this.

You Can Hide Information From The Past

By shifting your information to “Friends Only” you can prevent previous status updates from being made public. This is a great feature. Many users have been confused about privacy settings over the past couple years, and by making the settings work for information that was posted in the past, and in the future, users should now be clear about what is public and what isn’t.

You Should Review Your Settings

Once the new privacy settings roll out, you should immediately check your settings. This is because your settings will be saved as they currently exist. So if you have information that was made public through Facebook’s last privacy change (via the transition tool), you can now go back and make content (including status updates) that were previously made public, private.

Privacy Now Only Takes One Click

The most significant change here is that Facebook has shifted the privacy settings to only require one-click. By selecting “Everyone”, “Friends of Friends”, “Friends Only”, or “Recommended”, users can have most of their settings configured quickly. If users decide that they want to get even more granular with their settings, each aspect of their privacy can still be configured, as was the case before.

There Is Now A Single Directories Settings Page

Your Facebook information shows up in a number of directories around the web. In order to control how that information was displayed, you previously needed to visit a number of pages. All of those settings pages have been boiled down into a new privacy directory page (pictured below). This will control how (and if) people from Google, and within Facebook search are able to access you.

Settings Will Be Rolled Out Over The Next Few Weeks

Over the next few weeks, users will see the new privacy settings rolled out to via www.facebook.com/privacy. As users get used to the settings, we will be posting more comprehensive guides that explain everything. Overall, the new settings should be much easier as they only require a single click rather than configuring 50 different things. For those users what granular control, it still exists, but the redesigned privacy settings were built for the masses and that means they should be much more simple.

Check back over the coming weeks to learn more about what these new settings mean for you and your privacy and safety.