Content marketing via social media has to generate Return on Investment (ROI). As your number of social media fans and pages of content increase, so should your bottom line.

You can calculate social media ROI simple by monitoring your website traffic and conversion rate over time. As traffic driven for social networks, blogs and content platforms increases traffic and conversion rates you can monitor its effect.

There has been a lot of recent buzz surrounding new social media websites such as Pinterest.com. Now, even the graveyard of social media, MySpace.com, is said to be making a huge comeback. Just because a website is getting attention on among Twitterholics doesn’t mean it is a useful tool for Canarian businesses.

Part of the challenge of social media and content marketing is knowing where to share your content for maximum return on time invested. Canary Content focuses on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Flickr: They have user bases in the hundreds of millions and will be around for years to come. Some newer sites, while terribly fashionable, may well fade away, taking your audience and investment with them.

Canary Content knows that short content gets more shares on Facebook. This is because it is less of an imposition to share something small and easy to digest.

If you lend a novel to a friend and they don’t enjoy it, you have wasted a week of their time. On-line, a five minute video, or a 1500 word article, is the equivalent of a 300 page novel in the real world. Your audience is less likely to share long content as it might waste their friend’s time. Short content, such as a 30 second video or short text, is much less of an imposition and much more likely to be shared. It is the equivalent of a magazine, rather than a long book.