It is crazy to hire an employee, agree to pay a salary, give him/her a desk and computer, and then walk away. Unless you hired a really exceptional individual, you would be disappointed in the results.

To get the most from the investment you are making in a new staff member, it is very helpful to have a well defined job description and clearly outlined. Then your staff member knows on what to focus, and you have a way of measuring if you are achieving the result you want.
The same holds true when you make an investment in marketing!

You have clearly outlined a simple set of goals anyone can use to measure the performance of their on-line marketing.

It is crazy to hire an employee, agree to pay a salary, give him/her a desk and computer, and then walk away. Unless you hired a really exceptional individual, you would be disappointed in the results.

To get the most from the investment you are making in a new staff member, it is very helpful to have a well defined job description and clearly outlined. Then your staff member knows on what to focus, and you have a way of measuring if you are achieving the result you want.
The same holds true when you make an investment in marketing!

You have clearly outlined a simple set of goals anyone can use to measure the performance of their on-line marketing.

And to answer your question, yes, for clients, we've done what amounts to split testing on their social media marketing efforts to determine which social sites refer the best quality traffic, and which types of posts perform better there.

For example, in one case, we found StumbleUpon refers visitors with very low bounce rates, but female-targeted social news site Kirtsy refers a higher volume of visitors who are more likely to subscribe.

The article from Dan Zarrella that I linked to goes further down this vein. Obviously, I can't give out too much information here about client specifics.

And to answer your question, yes, for clients, we've done what amounts to split testing on their social media marketing efforts to determine which social sites refer the best quality traffic, and which types of posts perform better there.

For example, in one case, we found StumbleUpon refers visitors with very low bounce rates, but female-targeted social news site Kirtsy refers a higher volume of visitors who are more likely to subscribe.

The article from Dan Zarrella that I linked to goes further down this vein. Obviously, I can't give out too much information here about client specifics.

Here's how it works:
1. (once you create your account) You insert your url into the space provided and budurl shortens it for you (it creates one of those tinyurl addresses)
2. Once you have your new shortened address, that's the address you insert in your twitter message

Then budurl tells tracks how many people are clicking through to read your post. It refreshes just about every 10 secs so it does a pretty neat job of tracking who's reading when & where.

(Sheesh, I should write a post on it…) Anyway, just thought I'd share. Hope it's on topic and helpful…