Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter… You’ve for sure heard about it, and most probably you use one or more of these well-known social networks – for private, for business or for both.

The Snowball Effect

Social networks are hot – some will say too hot, but that is most probably because they did not figure out how to utilize social networks, yet. Social networks are self-reinforcing by nature. If your message is well received within a social network, there is a larger chance that somebody will pick it up and share the message within his/her group. That again increases the chances that the message is shared once again. You see the pattern? Once the snowball is rolling it is growing bigger and bigger. Just like your reader scope could do by using Zmags solution for Interactive Collateral Management.

New features in our latest release

Zmags latest release includes a smart feature that makes it easy for you to utilize social networks and expand your target audience. Readers of digital magazines, brochures, catalogs or newspapers can now easily share links to certain pages. A reader simply clicks the “tell-a-friend” button in your Zmags and selects to share the links on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or other popular social networks supported. This will add a link to the Zmag on the reader’s user profile, which will be shown to all the user’s friends, followers or visitors.

Worth remarking here is that the result is extended online scope at absolutely no additional cost or effort. The tools for sharing are out there and just two clicks away from the reader’s favorite social network. Whether readers choose to share it or not is ultimately a matter of how interesting your content is.

Is Social Media more than just talk?

Social networks are commonly criticized for being nothing but talk. That makes it almost impossible to measure return on investment on, if you use it for commercial purposes. And in the days of economic downturn it for sure is worth criticizing, if marketing activities do not create measurable results and accountability. But within social networks it is complicated: If three customers mention your brand name per day and reach out to 100 other people. What’s the exact value of that?

Utilizing Analytics to gain reader insight

We have another way to put it. What if you can measure how many additional readers you get from each social network. You probably know how many readers it takes on average to generate one lead in your business, right? Or how many extra readers you will need in order to raise prices for ads?

Through Zmags Analytics you can track how many additional readers you gained. In addition, you can see how many times a link was shared by your readers - per publication, per page and per social network. That’s about the closest you will get to measure a true ROI from social networks.