Social Media: Knowing Your Audience To Know Your Channels

In our personal lives, social media has become a way for you to connect with your friends, family, and maybe even your co-workers.  It seems like every year we have another platform popping up and giving marketers and businesses a way to reach an audience, hopefully their audience.  Larger companies may dedicate a group of 10-15 people to run social media, meanwhile the small business owner is left to fend for himself or herself.  So what is the right strategy for your company or business? While those small mom and pop-type stores might stick with Facebook as their website and “marketing” strategy, I would suggest spreading your wings.  Cause if you think Facebook and YouTube are your best bets because they are most popular, think again.  Just because a site is popular doesn’t mean it is a good fit for your business (Patel, 2014).  However, a handful of platforms would help with your business objectives, especially since social networking is now the number 1 activity on the web (Merchant Money, 2014)! According to Neil Patel (2014), 86% of marketers stated that social media is important for their business and 89% of marketers stated that increased exposure was the number one benefit of social media marketing.

So how do you decide what networks you should create a company profile for? For those with limited resources, you want to select those that offer the best potential for reaching your ideal audience and broadcast the type of media you’ve decided is best suited for your company (Levy, 2013). The main idea is to not spread yourself too thin, but as a rule of thumb, have your presence on the “Big 4” sites:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Google+
4. LinkedIn (Lohana, 2014)

You should consider Pinterest and Instagram, depending on your target audience (Lohana, 2014).  Pinterest is one of the biggest drivers of web traffic and if your audience is there, then you should be also.  Just like creating objectives, strategies, and tactics for an integrated marketing campaign, Hootsuite recommends creating a mission statement by identifying a unique purpose for each.  The blanket statement looks like this: “We will use (social network) for (purpose of this social network) in order to help (business goal)” (Sorokina, 2014).

Here are some examples of what your business might create to understand how each of these main social networks might help your company reach its business objectives:

• Facebook – We will use Facebook for advertising to target a specific audience in order to help increase sales.
• Twitter – We will use Twitter for customer service in order to increase customer happiness and promote customer loyalty.
• LinkedIn – We will use LinkedIn for building our company’s professional network to help establish our brand as experts in the field.
• Instagram – We will use Instagram for promoting and sharing our company culture to help with recruitment and employee happiness.
• Google+ - We will use Google+ for boosting SEO value of our online content to help increase visibility.
• Pinterest – We will use Pinterest for sharing high-quality images to help promote our products and increase sales. (Sorokina, 2014)

As you may or may not know, the subscription-model has become the latest rage in shopping for niche categories.  One of the best is Birchbox/ Birchbox Man, who is the leading discovering commerce platform.  They are redefininy the retail process by offering consumers a unique and personalized way to discover, learn about, and shop the best beauty, grooming, and lifestyle products on the market (Birchbox, n.d.).  Birchbox Man currently has 5 social media accounts that they operate daily.  These five networks are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram.  Birchbox Man has a content platform they call, “The Guide.” Each month has its own theme, which coincides with the box that gets mailed out to your home.  The guide will feature in-depth product reviews, lifestyle articles, and how-to’s articles and videos.  All of the content from the Guide is published across their various social channels and gets them a lot of interaction from fans and followers of these channels.  To build excitement around each monthly box, they will publish a sneak peak video on YouTube, but the only way they post the video, is by getting enough likes on their Facebook and Instagram channels.  Once that number is hit, they publish the video and you get the chance to see what products will be in your box. It’s like getting to peak behind Santa’s curtain, before Christmas day.  Aside from the monthly box of five samples, Birchbox Man sells the full-size products in their shop.  Featured products are also featured on their social channels as well.  Birchbox as a company does a great job with highly visual images, which is key for engagement.  Almost everyday, Birchbox will change the URL section on Instagram for that product. 

Social media doesn’t have to be overly complicated, it just takes some pre-planning and then execution.  Once you know the networks your audience uses, you want to use an editorial content calendar to keep yourself on track.  Create content that your audience finds useful, helpful, and relevant to them.  As a rule of thumb, stick with the 80/20 rule, 80% sharing and helpful and 20% promotional. 

While your goal with social media should be gaining reach and awareness for your company, it should also be about building a community.  If you sell a product or service, it doesn’t end at the sale.  That should be the beginning of the customer lifecycle, not the end.  The brands who get it right, are the brands that admit fault and are quick to fix an issue, they are the brands that talk with their audience and not at their audience.  Social media is very much like the offline world, where tenacity and consistency are required qualities to see results in your social media efforts (Frances, 2014).  Brian Solis says to introduce value, insight, and direction with each engagement (2010).  As a model of effective communication, it is all the more important because it puts the personal into every transaction – and we all want to be treated like a person, and not just a “consumer” (of media or anything else), right (Novak, 2010)?

Let me leave you with this, your content should be what draws them in, but the conversation around your community should be what keeps them there.  Leverage your social channels to not only talk to, but listen to your consumers pain points.  This is your chance to help your customer go from Mario, to Super Mario! Listen, engage, and serve! 

References

Birchbox. (n.d.). What is Birchbox? Retrieved from http://birchbox.com/about

Frances, J. (2014, July 20). Choosing the right social media platform for your business. Retrieved from http://www.business2community.com/social-media/choosing-right-social-media-platform-business-0949951

Levy, S. (2013, December 2). How to choose the best social media platform for your business. Retrieved from http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/230020

Lohana, P. (2014, November 4). 6 social media marketing tools to make your management quick and easy [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.jeffbullas.com/2014/11/04/6-social-media-marketing-tools-to-make-your-management-quick-and-easy/

Merchant Money. (n.d.). Social media & business [Infographic]. Retrieved from http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/choosing-most-effective-social-media-platform-your-business-infographic

Novak, C. (2010, July 27). Why conversation, not content, is king. Retrieved from http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/why-conversation-not-content-king

Patel, N. (2014, September 5). Which social media platforms are best suited for your business? [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/09/05/what-social-media-platforms-are-best-suited-for-your-business/

Solis, B. (2010, May 18). 21 Rules for social media engagement. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2010/05/18/rules-social-media-engagment/

Sorokina, O. (2014, November 3). Save time on social media: One social media profile, one mission [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://blog.hootsuite.com/the-purpose-of-each-social-media-profile/#pagetop

Bounce Rate: The Check Engine Light of Your Website

A website’s bounce rate is a metric that indicates the percentage of people who land on one of your web pages and then leave without clicking to anywhere else on your website – in other words, single-page visitors (Kusinitz, 2014).  High bounce rates can mean a multitude of things, including a website that isn’t user-friendly, keywords that are drawing the wrong kind of visitors, and many other factors. 

If you are looking to convert your website viewers to take some sort of action, then your goal should be getting your bounce rate lowered.  Since a high bounce rate can indicate that your website visitors aren’t looking for more content on your site, clicking on your calls-to-action, or converting into contacts (Kusinitz, 2014).  It’s important to keep in mind the purpose of the page and what it is, that you want the intended viewer to do.  If it’s just a blog post, then you may only be looking to get them to read the post and nothing more.  Look at time on site and the device people are using – you may uncover patters with these additional metrics that could inform how you fix the bounce rate problem (Soskey, 2014).  Bounce rates might indicate something is off with your site’s layout, design, and/or copy, but you need to dig into additional metrics to figure out the solution (Soskey, 2014). 

  

Brendan Egan of Simple SEO Group explained how they took a client from a 50% bounce rate, down to a 5% bounce rate, after launching a newly designed website (2013). 

The client was earning revenue through subscriptions via the website, as well as through advertisements on the actual website.  So in the case of this client, it was extremely important for the client to have a higher number of page views on the website and a lower bounce rate to be able to attract more advertising contracts on the site (Egan, 2013).  In the case of this client, it was important to add graphics, ease of navigation, and declutter the overall site (Egan, 2013). 

What can we learn from this case study? It’s important to point out that this doesn’t have to be tied down to any one particular industry.  Bounce rate is metric that all website admins should be aware of.  No matter how boring you think your industry or topic is, it’s important to:

•        Have a page that is easy to navigate, along with a clean design.
•        Clear call-to-actions
•        Useful and relevant content
•        Well-written copy

Once you get your bounce rate lower, your conversions rate goes up.  Your SEO goes up.  Your CTR goes up.  Your rankings go up.  Bounce rate is a powerful metric – it actually shapes the way that a site ranks, because it’s one of the few user-dependent features of a website’s ranking (Patel, 2014).  By reducing your bounce rate, you are paving the way for success in so many other areas (Patel, 2014).   

Are there any other ways that you would recommend trying to reduce your site’s bounce rate? 

References

Egan, B. (2013, January 23). Case study: How web design affects bounce rate. Retrieved from http://www.simpleseogroup.com/case-study-how-web-design-affects-bounce-rate/

Kusinitz, S. (2014, July 17). How to decrease your website's bounce rate [Infographic]. Retrieved from http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/decrease-website-bounce-rate-infographic

Patel, N. (2014, August 11). The no b.s. guide to reducing your website's bounce rate. Retrieved from http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/reduce-website-bounce-rate

Soskey, G. (2014, April 28). What is bounce rate (and how can I fix mine)? Retrieved from http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-bounce-rate-fix

Presidential Conversion Rates

Why do businesses have blogs? If it’s not to build awareness, then it’s to convert leads into buyers.  This can also be known as your conversion rates, which can be described in different outcomes, other than revenue gained.   According to Avinash Kaushik (2010), conversion rates are expressed as a percentage and defined as outcomes divided by unique visitors (or visits).  Some examples would be a percentage of website visitors who fill out a form, call your company, or purchase something from you online (Lavinsky, 2014). 

There are several ways to improve your rates, here are five examples of increasing your online conversion rates:

1. Social Proof: adding social proof, via customer testimonials and/or case studies, to your website virtually always increases conversions.
2. Clear Contact Information: clearly showing contact information, perhaps a phone number and/or live chat options, typically increases conversions by giving visitors confidence that your company is “real” and is there to answer any questions they have. 
3. Credibility: having “trust” seals, such as from the Better Business Bureau or from web security firms like Verisign, will nearly always conversions.
4. Guarantees: offering a guarantee gives customers more confidence in your offerings and thus generally increases conversion rates. 
5. Headlines: the headlines on your website pages are typically the first thing visitors read, and often compels them to read more of exit your site immediately.  The right headline could dramatically increase your conversion rate.  (Lavinsky, 2014)

So now that we understand what a conversion rate is, how do we know what makes a good conversion rate?  According to PPC optimization solution provider, Wordstream’s analysis of thousands of AdWords accounts with a combined $3 billion in annual spend, about ¼ of all accounts have conversion rates lower than 1% (Pruitt, 2014).  While the top 25% did much better with rates of 5.31% or greater and the top 10% of AdWords advertisers have an impressive rate of 11.45% (Pruitt, 2014).  So how does this translate to your business or blog? Is 3 – 5% a good conversion rate goal? This answer depends on what you spend to drive visitors to your site and how much each conversion is worth to your business (Pruitt, 2014). 

As we all know, political campaigns are an expensive endeavor and it takes money to keep them moving along.  Candidates use fundraisers, which can include a $10,000 per plate fundraisers, as a way to increase their campaign funds.  However, in 2008, the Obama campaign utilized social media and digital marketing as a way to increase campaign funds.  During 2007, Dan Siroker was director of analytics for then presidential candidate, Barack Obama.  Siroker’s job was to use data to help the campaign make better decisions (2010).  This idea started with just one simple experiment, which taught them that every visitor to the website was an opportunity and taking advantage of that opportunity through website optimization and A/B testing could help the campaign raise tens of millions of dollars (Siroker, 2010).

Source: Siroker, 2010

According to Siroker, the experiment was testing the media section and the Call-To-Action button of the splash page (2010).  Conversion rates can help tell if something is or isn't working with a CTA.  This can be as simple as placement and color or even the words used in the CTA.  Siroker and his team wound up testing four variations of the button: 

Source: Siroker, 2010

The metric used to measure success was sign-up rate, which was the number of people who signed up divided by the number of people who saw that particular variation.  Since there was a total of 310,382 visitors to the splash page during the experiment, this meant each variation was seen by roughly 13,000 people (Siroker, 2010).

Source: Siroker, 2010

This is data from the different version of the CTA buttons and the media used, for the splash page.  Keeping in mind the goal was to get higher sign-up rates, below was the stats for this goal. 

Source: Siroker, 2010

The Obama campaign clearly defined a simple goal, then used and tested different CTA's and media to figure out what was the most effective for sign-ups.  Using A/B testing they knew they had a winner for their splash page.

Source: Siroker, 2010

Siroker explains the best performing combination of button and media was "Combination 11," which was the "Learn More" button and the "Family" image (2010).  If the Obama campaign would not have tested and measured conversion rates, they would have had a conversation rate of 8.26%.  Instead the winning variation had a sign-up rate of 11.6% (Siroker, 2010).  

Conversion rates, while not the end all be all in measurements, can play a role in helping to determine what is working and what isn't working. 

References

Kaushik, A. (2010). Web analytics 2.0: The art of online accountability & science of customer centricity. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley.

Lavinsky, D. (2014, March 18). How to increase conversion rates. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/davelavinsky/2014/03/18/how-to-increase-conversion-rates/

Pruitt, N. (2014, October 1). A look at best practice conversion rates. Retrieved from http://www.getsmartcontent.com/blog/2014/10/look-best-practice-conversion-rates/