This is a guest post by Sarah Worsham, CEO & Web Strategist at Sazbean Consulting and blogging at Sazbean.com. Sarah is passionate about helping companies reach their business goals by using the web effectively. Sarah provides guidance through Internet Marketing, Strategy & Business consulting.

As business professionals sometimes we get caught up in blogging, twittering, facebooking and networking.  It seems like we’re putting hours and hours into blogging and networking.  We’ll ask for feedback at the end of blog posts, but no one usually replies.  We’ll ask questions on Twitter but don’t get many responses.  Is anyone listening?

The lack of replies may seem disheartening, but often times people will just read and monitor what you say but won’t take the time to actually engage in a conversation.  According to Forrester Research, consumers can be classified into different levels of participation (the supporting book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, is well worth the read).  Depending on the industry, country, age group and gender, up to 80% of your readers may just be spectators – meaning they’ll only read what you have to say, but they’ll never post a reply.

So how do you tell if anyone is listening?  First, take a look at your statistics.  If you’re blogging, how many visitors and visits do you get per day? per month? (Hopefully you’re using a stats program like Google Analytics, which filters out visits from bots, which are just computers visiting, not real people).  How many people are subscribed to your RSS feed?  Your newsletter list?  For Twitter, how many followers do you have on Twitter?  How often are your tweets re-tweeted? Try using a url shortening service, such as bit.ly or hootsuite, to find out how many people click on the links you tweet.

Whatever numbers you’re looking at, take a look at the trends – are more people following and looking at what you write over time? Then you can be sure that people are listening.  While your marketing efforts are not complete, you’re at least on your way….

This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 10:20 am and is filed under Only @ InSights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.