Yeah, yeah, social media is the greatest thing since the internet or desktop publishing. Anyone can do it. And it’s free. However, a lot of social media strategy is determining what’s working and what’s not working. What’s driving the results you want (sales, lower customer service costs) and what is a waste of time. Last week I killed Digg from my sharing profile. This week, I think I see two more platforms that are doing NOTHING for me, at least not with this client (me).

And it’s good to keep in mind that different networks work for different interest groups, so these results might be very different depending on your business. Mine is marketing, social media, and how to improve small business results using the social networks and content marketing. Your business is different. But you need to be able to pull your stats and take a look at things that are not working so you can eliminate them.

In my chart I see that my activity on delicious (my favorite social bookmarking site) is doing nothing for this site. And Tumblr is also worthless for me. And while Reddit and StumbleUpon are generating some traffic for me, their visitors are staying on my site for less than 30 seconds. And that’s pretty worthless too. Decision: I am eliminating Tumblr and Delicious from my sharing tools on uber.la. And while I will continue to use delicious for my social bookmarking, I no longer need to socialize every post of uber.la on those networks.

Learning what doesn’t work is an important part of the social media mix. What’s working for you? And here are two variations that are working: reddit is the highest driver of traffic for one of my  sites, and after some effort Pinterest has risen to the top of the list for another client. So don’t think you know, test and measure. And when you make changes see if your results improve or decline.

This slide is available from Slideshare.net: Know Your Social Network Referrals

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)

permalink: https://uber.la/2013/08/know-your-referrals/

Already know what you need? Let’s get started:

• FluentSocial (Social Media Marketing)
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