Entrepreneur Corner

(Editor’s note: Adam Toren is co-founder of YoungEntrepreneur.com. He contributed this story to VentureBeat.)

You’ve heard, time and again, how critical engaging in social media is to your start up – but you probably haven’t heard it laid out this succinctly: “[Social media] represents a powerful and additional channel to first listen to customers… and in turn, build two-way paths of conversations…. we also earn a place within their network as a trustworthy resource.”

The thoughts come from Brian Solis of PR 2.0 – and he really strikes at the heart of the matter – establishing your business as the trustworthy resource.

To the entrepreneur, a successful conversion rate is everything, which is why so much is written about measuring the success of marketing initiatives. With social media, though, it’s nearly impossible to track how well things are working.

While it’s possible to track traffic using things like Google Analytics, that doesn’t present the full picture – not even close.

Social media is primarily a public relations tool and is most beneficial in building brand and company awareness. To succeed, you need regular interaction with the general public.

That said, there are some tangible effects you can tweak. Use these sites to drive links to your website (though not in an overbearing manner, which could turn away members of that social media network’s community). These links, in turn, will boost your website’s ranking and Google “page rank” status. As your primary site gains authority in relevance to its primary keywords it will attract more organic traffic and qualified visitors to spur conversions.

There are several projects underway at several development hours to analyze the impact and conversion potential of social media sites. For example, Buzz Logic indexes millions of tweets and posts to identify trends and influences, including factors such as linking activity, blog popularity and author credibility. The company offers complex reports detailing the impact of various strategies and discussed subjects.

You might be used to click through rates and conventional advertising methods establishing conversion rates. As the market changes, social media is a helpful tool to augment an overall marketing campaign.

One word of warning: It’s not a quick fix. In fact, it’s quite the contrary. Establishing this trust is as hard, if not harder, than establishing your company’s your credibility in the business world. You need excellent customer relations and customer service, over delivery and quality product.

Before the days of the Internet, commerce was driven by complex human interaction and by relationship with past and potential clients. Social media presents this to us once again, virtually.

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Tags: marketing, social-networking