The Most Important Social Media Metrics

photo credit: David Paul Ohmer via photopin cc

As a small business owner, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the myriad social networks, their analytics, and your responsibilities to them. But, at the same time, it can be difficult to prioritize where to expend your effort, and which metrics matter. As with most factors when it comes to running a small business, it depends on your goal. Whether you’re wanting to get the word out, bring in revenue, or get a great reputation, this will determine which aspects of social media will best answer the question, “How well am I doing?”

The First Steps

Before you get into metrics for your specific goal, you have to make sure your social media profiles are providing the basic benefits. Each metric you track should spread brand awareness, generate leads, or maintain (or improve) brand experience or reputation—and the best metrics will fall into more than one of those categories. Once you’ve established that baseline, you can narrow down your list based on what you hope to achieve by following specific metrics.

Getting the Word Out

When you unveil a new product or enact a new policy, your primary concern is maximizing its exposure. The more people who see it, the greater a success it will be. Pay attention to likes, shares, and views—these factors show how many people are interacting with your content. Referrals to your website and mentions of your brand also fall into this category; measuring customer awareness of your brand and product can tell you how that information spreads best. That will allow you to adjust your social media usage accordingly, and draw in the most people.

There are many different strategies for getting the word out, including:

• Blogging: A steady stream of fresh, relevant blog posts serve a dual purpose: they’ll boost your company’s search engine rankings, and they’ll keep customers coming back for the latest articles. The most important thing is to be consistent, and to offer timely, compelling content.
• Emails: In today’s social world, it’s important to tie in your email marketing with social media. Include Facebook and Twitter links within the body of your email.
• Social Advertising: Most social media networks offer advertising opportunities. Take the time to understand how the ad programs work, what investment is required, and typical results other businesses have achieved.
• Contests/Giveways: By offering special incentives on social media sites, you’ll encourage your fans and followers to share your links and spread the word to their own networks.

Getting the Revenue In

On the other hand, if your driving motivation for social media is increasing revenue, your focus should be on metrics that measure more concrete details. Pay attention to which social platforms lead to customers or click-throughs, or have a low bounce rate. By looking at leads and sales-oriented metrics, you’ll be better able to grasp your return on investment, so you can confidently set up a marketing plan using social media to the best impact. Tracking word-of-mouth referrals can also be useful: they are the equivalent of any positive review, share, or click-through, and often have more sway among friends.

There are many effective social media tracking tools available, some of which are free or very inexpensive. Here are just a few:

• Hootsuite: This is an Internet-based tool that houses all of your social media accounts in one easy, intuitive dashboard. From one place, you can create and send messages, assign tasks to employees, and collaborate on projects.

• Klout: Using a complex algorithm, Klout assigns your business a score based on how active you are on social media networks. You can also evaluate other companies’ Klout scores to determine who you share content with (or accept content from).

• Google Analytics: Google offers a Social Reports tool that calculates how your social media traffic is impacting revenue. This gives you valuable insight into the best investment of your social media activity.

• Facebook Insights: From this online dashboard, you can view detailed reporting of your Facebook activity, allowing you to gain better insights into the behavior and motivations of your followers.

Getting the Reputation Up

One of the best uses for social media is simply being part of the conversation—putting your company out there, interacting with customers and potential customers, and staying present in people’s minds. Keeping tabs on brand mentions, as well as the duration of engagement and ratio of activity of your clientele, will keep you on the right track in the social media sphere, and help you immediately enter crisis mode if the need arises.

• SocialMention is a handy tool for tracking brand mentions. Simply enter your business name and view an instant report of where customers are talking about you on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other networks.

Once you’ve identified your goal for social media, you’ll be able to take advantage of the measurable metrics to see if you’re on the path to achieving that aim.

This is a guest article by Megan Totka @ Steamfeed.com

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Google, Social & Content Marketing: Can We Quantify Quality & Qualify Quantity?

The concept of "quality" has been an ongoing discussion, especially with Google algorithms and in light of the recent updates like Panda and Penguin.
The crux of the problem is – how do you quantify quality?

For example, I looked at all my previous SEW posts to see if I could find some commonality in the posts that were the most popular. I defined most popular by the number of shares each of them got and the number of comments. I found that there is almost no correlation between how good the posts were (in my opinion) and how popular they were.

It made me think about all the great content I was missing. If my best posts, even on a distribution network as wide as SEW, don't get as much "love" as my mediocre posts, then I can only imagine how many brilliant posts I must be missing just because they aren't getting the benefit of big numbers.

Somewhere, on an obscure blog, a piece of content might just change the way we think about marketing, but we're completely unaware of it because the collective readership of that blog is so tiny that it will never be brought to our attention.

Quality, Relevancy, and How to Use Google

How do you use data (numbers) to represent quality, especially when that quality is mere perception? Who's to say that one article is better or more important than another?

Google uses a multitude of indicators to assess relevancy – inbound links, social signals, authority, PageRank, and so on. All of these are programmatic measures to determine the relevancy of a web page to a search term.

In the last few years Google has made a concentrated effort to also assess quality. However, since these are just indicators to assess quality (and relevancy when it comes to search), they are prone to mistakes and manipulation.

Image Credit: domainkablog.com/

Take the topic of website traffic for example. If you search for the very specific, long-tail term [top 10 ways to drive traffic to your website], you will get a slew of blog posts about this exact topic. Some are newer than others, but they all discuss the same topic – so far, so good.

Dive deeper and you'll see that they actually offer different sets of top 10 ways for driving traffic to your website. Which means that for subjective topics without a clear answer, you shouldn't ask Google for the right answers (possibly because there is no "right answer") but use it a jumping-off point for your research and find the right answer for you.

But this is all based on the assumption that the algorithms work and the most relevant content is being surfaced to the top (because no one really goes to the second or third SERP).

Gaming the System

Now, this is all old news for anyone who's been in SEO for more than two minutes – Google's algorithm determines who ranks at the top based on over 200 variables that assess relevancy to the search term, and there are ways to make sure you are well positioned (optimized) to boost your ranking.

Through the years, people have tried to "game the system" with a variety of black hat SEO practices, like link buying, content farms, keyword stuffing and more. But gaming the system is not a unique problem to the Google marketplace and the new darling of digital marketing, social networks, is facing similar challenges.

Image Credit: Wired

In a Wired story, Mat Honan wrote about juicing your story popularity with social media. He outlines only a few of the services that allow you to buy followers, Likes, pageviews, and tweets. The point is clear: popularity can be bought.

And since more solutions are now using social signals like tweets, shares, likes, Klout score and authorship – and popularity (at least the digital version of it) has become synonymous with influence – in the new world of social media all that matters are your numbers. And you can easily buy them.

The 'Science' of Content Marketing: Why Quantity Always Wins

What is concerning about this new reality is that it leaks into the way we consume content as well. We are more likely to read something that has 9,000 tweets than we are to read something that only has 19 tweets.

Social signals are now a modifier of our behavior and determine not just our exposure to content but also our perception of it. Add our shortening attention span supported by 140-character tweets, punch line subject lines and content aggregators that virtually chew the content for you and inject it into your bloodstream, and we no longer consume content, we swallow it.

And how many of you have lost any enjoyment in reading a well-written piece? When was the last time you actually enjoyed reading a blog post without just tweeting it right away?

Image Credit: SocialTimes

So as marketers, we create more content that is easier to consume. Shorter blog posts, lists, 10 tips, 15 ways, 51 ideas, presentations with large images and only few words, 90-second videos, and memes.

One might argue that it forces us to find creative ways to deliver our message in more effective ways and simplification is actually the hardest task. I wouldn't disagree with such a statement, but the reality is that most of us don't; we just rehash old content and package it in a different way. We do it because we have removed all of the substance from our content and, just like with our food, in order not to get hungry, we just consume way more.

We download content like we're going through a fast food drive through; we order it by the bucket. And as marketers, we keep enabling it because hell, we want those tweets too.

The current research about content marketing focuses more about the marketing side than the content side. It's about how to get more shares, more tweets, and more readers.

Those are great questions to ask about your content marketing because if you do write something valuable you want to show it to the world, you want it to get as much exposure as possible. But most of these tips are to make things easier to read, easier to share, and shorter and faster to consume because we would rather trade some quality for quantity.

Top 5 Ways to Share This Post on Twitter

Am I any different? Hell no. I want those shares as much as anyone. I'm part of this game and I will try to play it to the best of my ability – and do my best each time to get 500+ tweets.

If you'd like to help me reach my goal, here are five tweets you can use to share this blog post:

• @uribarjoseph rants about content marketing [link to this post] via @sewatch
• Why quantity always wins [link to this post] by @uribarjoseph via @sewatch
• Is popularity and influence the same? [link to this post] by @uribarjoseph via @sewatch
• Please retweet! How to get more shares for your content [link to this post] by @uribarjoseph via @sewatch
• Quality and relevancy are not the same [link to this post] by @uribarjoseph via @sewatch

Article Post @ Search Engine Watch

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Social Media Automation: A Beginner's Guide for Small Business Owners

Social media has been in the news for years as the newest marketing tool that will transform how businesses are promoted. Large companies leverage considerable brand and reach with clever social media campaigns that, seemingly, go viral instantly. Small business know the reality, watching contests fall flat and their best efforts stall – leading them to feel the promise has not been fulfilled and that the return on investment from social media is small or non-existent.

There are also many mixed messages about what constitutes appropriate use of social media. This leaves small business owners confused, lumping social media in with SEO as another online marketing phenomenon they don't like or understand ¬– and certainly can't afford.

Direct ROI for Social Media Stinks

 

Expectations for social media are too high. This is understandable, given the viral spread of bullied bus matrons and delivery guys saving falling babies.
On the face, the data for social media isn't good. Many small businesses measure return on investment with crude numbers: "How many leads did it bring me last month?" Many don't have strong tracking or CRM, so they trust their gut.
Direct leads from social media for a small business can be very low, especially in less interesting spaces. People aren't very excited about retweeting news from a septic system cleaning business.

Social Media Automation is Wrong

Another big barrier for small businesses is the notion that social media is extremely hard and time-consuming.

Social media advocates tend to be overzealous, believing that everyone wants to tweet their every meal and check-in wherever they go. But the reality is that many people don't embrace a lifestyle of constant pluses, liking and pinning.
To make things worse, the mainstream message is that automation of any portion of social media marketing is somehow spammy.

How Small Business Should Use Social Media

The case for including social media in the small business Internet marketing portfolio is steadily increasing.

• There is strong evidence that social signals now influence search rankings on most major search engines.
• Social media is often used as an "assist" as consumers determine the legitimacy and reputation of a business during the purchasing process.
• Improved branding has both human and search engine benefits.
• Customer retention is often enhanced by a strong and responsive social media presence.
• Word-of-mouth referrals regularly happen on social media, driving traffic to the website.

Rather than avoiding social media entirely, small businesses should recognize that these secondary benefits are critical and to automate as much as possible to keep costs down. Lower expectations, and start slow. Here are some guidelines:

Social Media Tasks to Automate

• Automatically share every blog post to multiple social media platforms.
• Use software to schedule posts so your feeds look alive when you are asleep.
• Find strong sources of industry-specific content that your audience will enjoy that you won't have to create.

 

Don't Automate These Social Media Tasks

• Highly-customized content that complements the industry news mentioned above, but shows the personality and human-side of the business.
• "Thank yous": When a human reaches out to you, find a way to build the contact into a relationship with a highly customized (i.e., human) response.
• Refollows: Don't follow every follower. Many are machines and bring no value.
• Retweets: Automation will reduce the quality of social media presence.

 

Conclusions

Small business needs to recognize that ignoring social media because "it did not bring enough leads in last month" is no longer acceptable thinking.
Search engines are now incorporating social signals. Consumers research social media during purchasing decisions and use it as a customer service channel. And both branding and link-baiting benefit from strong social media management.

Small business owners are resource-constrained and need to be clever. Leveraging automation in the execution of social media management is smart, but can be taken too far.

Bring human resources to the table where the opportunity for real social media engagement exists, and use computers to make all else more efficient. Just be sure the quality meets high standards and builds audience.

Article Post @ Search Engine Watch

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