Energize Your Marketing
Through Social Media
Part 3 of 3
Build
Social media has expanded the ways you can stay in touch with your target market. It brings you into their daily lives, allowing you to build brand loyalty by deepening their response grooves and strengthening their emotional bond. Social media also provides several channels through which your increasingly loyal consumers can share their brand experiences and preferences with others.
Measure
Why do any of this? Because you can measure your social media ROI and continually refine your strategy to improve your results. In measuring the success of your social media, consider adding Google Analytics, follower counts and SEO ratings.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the best tools out there for analyzing traffic on your Web site. Use Google Analytics to:
- Run and view reports
- See how your site is performing weekly, daily or even hourly
- Analyze what visitors do when they come to your site
- Track conversion ratios
- See where your traffic comes from (are they typing in your URL or finding you in a search engine, for example)
- Find out how long they stay on your site (how many pages they view, which ones, etc.)
- Check your bounce rate (percentage of users who leave after viewing only one site page)
Counting followers
Counting your Facebook fanbase, your Twitter followers or your blog followers is a simple means of measuring the success of a social media campaign. In social media, numbers count. Fans can be fickle and may not want to promote a business or product that doesn’t have a robust following. Visitors will often read back through old posts before deciding whether or not to become fans themselves. Lead out with a dozen strong entries to jumpstart your Facebook fanbase, your Twitter following or your blog.
SEO ratings
Start with basic search engine optimization, then use social media activity to build backlinks and raise the activity level of your Web site. To make your Web site, blog and social media activities search-engine friendly:
- Use approved coding practices (clean codes keeps your Web site out of the Google garbage can, otherwise known as the supplemental index)
- Know what people are searching for (key words and terms)
- Align content with search terms
- Get more incoming links from SE
- Watch your SE ratings soar
I do hope these suggestions and guidelines are helpful as you explore the new world of social media. Start out small. Learn by doing. Accept that change is constant. And have fun.
