1. Add the site to Google Webmaster tools

Obvious, huh? However, this allows tracking of Google+ button clicks easily and produces valuable data about click profile changes. This should be a basic step for each larger website anyways.

2. Fix the Facebook open graph tags.

Facebook’s open graph like buttons do not work properly “out of the box”. There are couple tags required for them to become useful and traceable. You will be able to contact page liker’s from within FB after the fixing the tags for home page. You should not forget to define facebook admins for the site in the web page headers. Then you will be able to add and monitor your webpage in Facebook’s business insights.
This tool will allow easy validation of each page: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/

3. Add social events tracking to Google Analytics

This one is very important if you are using Google analytics. Although GA tracks Google+ clicks out of the box, it does not track other social events. So, you should add some custom JS in the page code to launch specific analytics events on social button actions. The generic code is to launch trackSocial method in Javascript:
_gaq.push(['_trackSocial', network, socialAction, opt_target, opt_pagePath]);
Only the network and action are required and they are passed as custom text. The opt_target parameter is useful when one uses like button for other page than default one. This page offers the best explanation how to implement facebook likes and tweet tracking : http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingSocial.html
Note, that this code is for asynchronous tracker. It will require some modifications if you use synchronous tracking, and you should probably switch to asynchronous tracker anyway. Also, you should switch to new Google analytics interface to see the tracking results.

Fix the JS of sharing buttons to track social actions as well

The code above is not universal. It tracks clicks on the default sharing/like buttons only. However, you will not be notified after shares resulting from social sharing plug-ins like AddThis or similar. However, as long as you have access to API or can modify JS, you can track these events as well:

<script type="text/javascript">

var addthis_config = {
data_ga_property: ‘UA-xxxxx-xx’,
data_track_clickback: true,
pubid: “addthis-id”
};

</script>

This configuration is enough to start tracking social Addthis actions in google analytics. Similar approaches might be applicable by other social sharing services.

5. Consider installing Seevolution or other JavaScript heatmap tool

Some services cannot be tracked easily. In such cases there are one option only: track clicks directly. And the best tools for that are javascript heatmap trackers. There are some choices there, though Seevolution ( http://seevolution.com ) is great and allows tracking several sites for free.

6 (bonus). Add google Alerts for tracking your website name and brand names over the web

Not every social interaction originates on your site. You should monitor your mentions on google alerts and some other services as well. This might lead to perfect opportunity to get more exposure and new visitors.

Will these 6 things cover all social interactions about your website? Definitely not. However, implementing these steps will result in much better understanding of what is happening around your site.

Any additional ideas or comments?

The short answer they both serve a bit different purposes. Open Graph API helps people to connect themselves to brands. Facebook pages provide easier way on interacting with your fans. There is a much wider ecosystem of Facebook Applications than Open Graph applications at the moment.

Also, one needs to use FB application for managing and monitoring all the interactions through a website properly. Open graph insights are still a bit limited for my tastes, but I hope that new tools will emerge.

Also, Facebook pages help controlling brand mentions in SERP results, which might be important for reputation management. This can not be replaced by Open Graph API.

However, Open Graph shines with ability to help users quickly share recommendations and likes. It is easy to create Like button or Facebook comment box which pluggins that are already here. New tools will emerge that will aggregate and process user tastes. There are some examples already.

Overall, I would skip creating facebook pages under single condition: you will not have time nor content to represent your business in facebook. There are some websites that would not take too much use from community (for example, quick-help howto websites), but facebook page would not hurt anyways. On the other side, Open Graph might not be really useful in cases of existing Facebook page and little content on the website itself.

Looking back, pageviews is a viable objective for some markets that sell main-stream products or try to strengthen brand. However, is it likely that I would go to a club in completely opposite side of the world or that I would do grocery shopping there anytime soon?

This issue affected display advertisement for a while already, and it affects social marketing even more so. People will not speak positively about unnecessary service that is pushed to them . More than likely they will laugh at it. And that will reduce credibility.

Back to real-world example. I have a marketer in my friend list that tries to push me a DJ fan page and events that are never close to my location. The marketer found me by inviting fans of other DJ’s that play internationally and reside in my location. Do your research, people. I see no reason to become fan of page that is not relevant.

How to remedy situations like this? Invest some time into looking for related local groups. Local clubs the DJ plays would be good start instead of international DJs themselves. That would lead to fans that are relevant and (maybe) interested. Simple, eh?

• You follow everyone back but spam bots and try to build relationship with majority of them.
• You follow only handful of interesting people and build deeper relationship with them.

Can these two ways meet somewhere? I am sure it can. Here’s what I think and do:

1. I do not focus on following people that follow everyone back only.
2. Do not follow bots : twitterfeed-only or API-only posters, feeds except if they are really valuable.
3. If a person follows you, check if he is worth following : interesting insights, replies (interacts) with other real people (believe me, there are bots that interact in between), maybe retweets (but not only retweets), and website is not about money making or with Bill Crosbies video
4. Pay people you follow the same courtesy: Interact with them, talk with them, share their posts if you find them worthwhile, answer their questions. Most important, you should help them if you can.
5. I unfollow and block most of the follow teasers, which are bots/people who follow just to get follow back, and then unfollow you. This was done to increase their follower numbers and follower/followed ratio. Twitter Karma is good for that.
6. Have fun and enjoy twitter. That is most important.

Just remember, real people and real interactions are what twitter is for.  Having large follower count is ego boost, but what if you can’t hear real people that are there and they can’t hear you?

RSS and content aggregation was the news distribution format for last couple of years. It successfully replaced newsletters in some of the markets, and I personally think it is much more convenient to subscribe to couple of the news feeds than getting news in my email box. At the moment I am subscribed to around 40 feeds.

This brings another question. How much time do I have to spend for reading these feeds? Well, not much, but I would prefer much less. There are a lot of rewriting and reposting going around. If something happens with Google, bing or yahoo, then all SEM blogs will post same post, which has no real value. This is why more and more people are using twitter to catch the latest news and be informed.

Additionally, Twitter is much better at real-time. RSS feed reader requests feeds periodically. Although there are works around this drawbacks (ping interfaces, and new Google RSS push protocol), this is still a problem for RSS.

Thirdly, in many cases you can communicate with the owner of information in twitter. Sure, there are lots of bots. But you can try sending a @reply to them for getting more information about the topic. Or you wish to share something.

So it looks like twitter will surely replace RSS feed reading and feed reader market will decrease?

Not so fast. Twitter is bad at couple things as well. Firstly, twitter real time means that you need to be there once new information wave hits. You will surely miss some news just because your work schedule does not allow regular checking of twitter stream.

Second problem is that you might miss smaller, niche news quite easily after your information stream grows. Twitter is quite main stream, even with the targeted followers. Tweetdeck and Seesmic help solving some of these problems, but I will not replace too important feeds by twitter.

To summarize:

• Where missing the information is not critical
• Where realtime is more important than reliability
• If you want to talk with the author.

Use RSS:

• Where you can’t miss a post (niche or highly important stuff).
• Realtime or communication is not important
• When following persons twitter will not provide enough value or the person is highly annoying

Thus, RSS will not go anywhere soon. It still has its own uses, and it is good so.

However, this story teaches another, not so obvious, lesson. As I look through tweet list of people I follow, I tend to skip all the green dudes as single, green person. Your icon is no longer so distinguishable, especially so if you pick dullish shade of green. And if you tweet about something unrelated to Iran, you are out of look – your messages are missed in the whole crowd. People recognize you by your icon and not the text usually, so changing icon is not too good strategy as well.

How to ride that twitter wave and still remain recognizable? It is easy – choose a bit different shade of green or add some green elements. Some good examples:

These are couple of few profiles that are not missed in the stream of tweets despite promoting the cause.

And another quick point. Do not stay green for too long. Iran election will not be buzz topic for long. At some point you will have to choose how long you want to be associated with old news.

The downside of AlertThingy is lack of columns and limited Facebook support. Thus after a while I started looking for another client and found a remake of twirl – Seesmic Desktop. Since it supports both twitter and facebook (even multiple accounts) I am very happy with its performance. It is Adobe Air program, thus not OS based.

The best of Seesmic is that it is developed actively and does not crash that often. There are issues, as adobe Air is not too efficient with memory. But most of them will be fixed with time. I still like tweetdeck design more too, tho differences are not so significant.

The worst kind of offenders is easily to spot on twitter: Users, whose all posts are links to some content they push from specific feeds. The most annoying kind is pushed by twiterfeed, which pushes quite a lot messages at once. This effectively spams my timeline with crap I have read couple times before. Usually, there is not even a single reply, retweet or linkless message in their whole timeline. Their business is elsewhere – maybe in their blog/website, maybe they do not know what to do with their twitter account. I follow some of them for single reason only: if I am moderately interested in specific market, they can work as news feed in single place for information about niche.

Another quite funny type of bots are people who use periodical reminders for their specific content/products. They are relatively harmless if they provide some useful content between their bot messages. I doubt that the person who read the same message 5th time is more likely to buy product advertised than the one who read the message 4th time only.
Automatic systems do not work that well without some brains. You can advertise about tools that allow one get 20 000 of followers, but everyone will laugh at your message if you have only 1000 of them. You can push automatic content into twitter, but it will not be read as long as it is not relevant or fresh to your readers.

Neverless, using Hummingbird or similar tool is ok as long as you look before auto-following people. You have to decide what are they interested in : you or just follower count.

There are lots of opinions about that. I kind of like post in DoshDosh that you should not follow everyone: there are lots of bot users that use bots to grow their user numbers without any interest in you. However, your real follower policy should depend on your business model. So reasoning behind post about why it is useful to follow small guy is important too.

However, there are always people whom you can un-follow without any risk losing customer or useful connection:

1) People that follow lots of people and have no posts on their own. Usually there are very few people following them back. Later these accounts will spam you with ads, or they are trying to promote their blog that way (that is category 3 ).

2) People which all posts are made through tweetfeed – they just stream their blog, and you will not get any more information from twitter than subscribing through RSS. Remember, RSS is much easier for following posts than twitter. There are valid uses for feeding information in twitter: news bots, service announcements, etc. There is no need for them to follow anyone except for self promotion.

3) People whose all posts are adverts, bot messages and are not interesting for you. Believe me, they are here to sell you product and will not help you in any way. Sure, you can follow them if you are interested in their products, but do not expect any interesting discussion or help from their side. Sure, many people will drop an ad or 2 in their conversations, or promote their brand in other way. That is OK, as long as I get some information or at least their opinion free.

That is the policy I am using for myself in twitter. It works for me as of now.