Social media measuring

18/06/10 posted by Liz Niland

Disney’s newest cash cow - Toy Story 3 - is the first ‘Promoted Tweet’ to grace Twitter. Drawing a mixed reaction from users of the service, the Promoted Tweets allow a company to pay (a massive sum of money) to see their brand in the site’s ‘Trending’ topics and at the top of the tree in the Twitter search results for that keyword.

It’s not exactly a small business marketing tactic - unless you’ve got a Disney-sized pot of gold behind you - but if it’s successful for the big players, there is at least hope that Twitter may work on something for the little guys. In the meantime though, it will be interesting to see the take-up of the service amongst giants that could quite easily reach social and SEO peaks by barely lifting a little finger.

If you do happen to have some Disney-gold burning a hole in your bank account though - or if you just want to have a look inside a massive social media marketing department - Mashable have got an insider look at Gatorade’s “Mission Control Center”. With six monitors and custom-built visualisation software, this is social media monitoring that goes well beyond your average cost-per-click breakdown.

Measuring the engagement and social interaction around the brand, including tweets about the brand, about competitors and mentions on blogs and other social sites, is part of Mission Control’s primary goal to “take the largest sports brand in the world and turn it into largest participatory brand in the world.” While we obviously can’t all have our own Mission Control, it is still vitally important to monitor your brand online. By using report features in advertising and SEO software, Google-ing yourself or your business (yes, it pays to be so vain) and engaging with your social media fans/followers, you are giving yourself the best chance of success - both on and offline.