While you’ve been digging yourself out of the snow again — and again — and again — awe.sm’s continued to make it easier to power, measure, and optimize your social media marketing funnel. Since we launched awe.sm for Marketers this summer, we’ve worked closely with our customers to make refinements, add features, and make marketers’ lives easier.

With enhancements added daily, and some more exciting ones coming up soon, now’s a good time to step back and check in on our high-level features.

Fundamentally, awe.sm works by powering trackable social sharing, bringing visibility to how this sharing contributes to your marketing funnel, and providing insights you can use to improve your efforts and maximize your ROI.

How? Glad you asked…

Make lots of links.

The backbone of awe.sm is creating short, customized tracking links for activity you share across your social channels. For example, if you’re sharing a blog post to three social networks — Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, say… — awe.sm will make three links, one for each channel. This is different from how a link shortener works, and it makes it possible to break out the clicks, pageviews, and business results that come from each network.

Our dead-simple link creator and site tools automate the process of creating new links and keeping track of where they go and how they’re used, to give you powerful visibility into what works.

Track conversions.

Conversion tracking has been a staple of web analytics for as long as there’s been a web. awe.sm brings closed-loop attribution to social media marketing, too.

Define custom conversion goals that match your business’s KPIs — sales, registrations, video views, app downloads … anything that matters to you — and track how much of each result from every social post. This makes it possible to track the ROI of social in dollars and cents, not just in Likes and Retweets.

Identify top performers.

It’s easy to use awe.sm’s reporting tool to slice and dice on every dimension.

Want to compare how different shared content performs? See which pieces of content drive engagement and earn conversions, so you can optimize your content strategy.

Want to find people who amplify your message and share it with their followers? Track the shares created by each site visitor to see what they share, measure the impact they create, and connect with them directly to reward them or ignite their engagement.

Track virality.

Track social media marketing’s elusive rainbow unicorn: the source of “virality”. Your Tweet drives my Facebook share, which drives my boss’s Pin, which leads to a conversation on Disqus, and his friend’s purchase — so awe.sm tracks multiple generations of sharing across multiple channels.

When you have visibility into how your posts perform, how content is re-shared throughout your community, and how that sharing contributes to your goals, then you can grab the unicorn by the horn.

Capture all of your visitors’ sharing.

When was the last time you clicked a share button? … No? Us neither. So awe.sm doesn’t just track the sharing your visitors perform with your sharing buttons, we also capture what happens when a visitor grabs your page’s link out of their address bar.

It shouldn’t surprise you that social conversations unfold across IMs, emails, comments, and more — but it might surprise you to know that this kind of sharing happens almost ten times more frequently than anyone clicks a share button. If you’re not tracking this, you don’t understand what’s going on.

But wait — there’s more!

Don’t even get us started … well, okay, you already did. But if you’re interested in learning more, geeking out with analytics nerds, and checking things out, let’s get in touch.

*Originally posted on the awe.sm blog

Social is big, and getting bigger…

Last year, there were 1.4 billion social network users; by the end of this year, 60% of Internet users are expected to be on Facebook alone, which represents an increase of nearly 20% this year.

This growth rate and the size of this opportunity are staggering: within four years, brands’ social marketing spending will pass $11 billion per year, $14 billion will be spent in social commerce, and 50% of e-commerce will be referred by social and mobile posts. In the face of year-over-year declines in traditional media advertising, it isn’t an exaggeration to describe social as the future of advertising.

…but it needs to be measured

What’s possibly most amazing about this growth is that it comes even though companies’ social investments have basically been blind gambles. According to a recent survey, 47% of marketers do not monitor social communities at all. Of those who do, 40% only measure superficial metrics such as “likes” and comment volume; and fewer than 25% measure the ROI of their campaigns.

Demand clearly exists for measurement and accountability in this space, and the market has responded — there is growth in the category of sales and measurement tools. But awe.sm is the only technology that measures social performance, and performance — customers acquired, visitors converted, dollars and cents — is the only measure that matters.

Brands and agencies are next

awe.sm has spent the past four years developing extensible and powerful technology for measuring the outcomes of every single social post. Since the company took its first round of funding, we rolled out a toolkit of powerful developer APIs, and developed innovative reporting tools used by some of the industry’s most interesting social-enabled software.

These developments make it possible to visualize the success of earned media — that is, how does sharing lead to business? Now, it’s time to bring this visibility to owned media — the work brands and agencies do to start conversations and spread the word on social networks.

In coming weeks, awe.sm will be rolling out a tool to view, on one screen, the entire social funnel: how many retweets, likes, and engagements did each social post receive?; how many clicks back to a site does each drive?; and what business impact — in registrations, pageviews, and transactions — resulted?

Let’s do this

I will be applying my two decades of experience in the media industry to introduce this technology to the brands and agencies on the leading edge of innovative social marketing. Meanwhile, our talented — and expanding — team continues to innovate and improve our powerful performance measurement tools. The ultimate goal is no less than revolutionizing social marketing by bringing full visibility and performance optimization to every social action.

This is ambitious, exhilarating, and … totally awe.sm.

*Originally published on the awe.sm blog.