Facebook, Twitter and Google +, OH MY!

Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare…feeling overwhelmed yet?  With all the social media mediums available how do you begin to understand what platforms to participate to grow your business?  Let’s say I am a new cupcake and treat bakery in downtown Chicago called Yumazing.  Cupcakeries are a hot trend, so how am I going to set myself apart?  I need to create awareness, get customers in the door, generate buzz and then maintain loyalty to keep them coming back.

As a business owner I have to look at my business model, profile my customer base, investigate exactly where my customers are hanging out online, and decide what social spaces are going to reach the many.  What is important to understand is that you don’t have to participate in every social space to be relevant. Participate only with select platforms that you are going to garner the best exposure and do them well. 

The goal is to create conversations that are in line with your business objectives.  Create these conversations by publishing content that is going to get your followers to interact. Remember content without conversation is just broadcasting (Novak, 2010).  For a cupcakery, which post do you think is going to be more engaging?

      A)   We have a new cupcake today

      B)   We have a new chocolate cheesecake #cupcake at @Yumazing, come in today, show us your tweet and try it for free

      When crafting posts, ask yourself if this is a conversation starter.  Try some of these best practices for engagement:

1. Use rich media within your posts to make them engaging.
2. Solve problems with posts – a way to improve their daily life.
3. Use your fans’ content to make them feel part of your brand.
4. Involve customers with a question.
5. Let them fill in the blank –______ will satisfy my sweet tooth today.
6. Photo caption posts with the allure of photos with people’s love of interacting with brands they identify with – do this to trigger emotion.
7. Tie your brand with quotes that support your campaign goals and use visuals with your quotes.
8. Ask your fans to do something.  Come in today.  Vote with like versus share for an option A or B.
9. Use hashtags to categorize terms to increase brand, product and campaign awareness to wider audiences (Bunskoek, (2013).

Allocating your resources

Ideally, the person who is managing your advertising and public relations will be the person driving the messaging with social media sharing - you want your marketing campaigns to run in parallel.  For a small start-up business like Yumazing, social media management might come directly from the store manager or might be best outsourced to a third-party, so bakery management can better focus on running the day-to-day business activities.  As an example for Yumazing, if I get feature story in Confectioners Magazine, I might advertising in that issue, link that article to the News section of my website and share a link to the article on my website via my social channels.  This, my friend, is what we call Integrated Marketing Communications.

What platforms are Yumazing?

More than 500 million people use Facebook globally and almost half log into their account each day (Facebook, 2013).  The ability to connect with your community through your news feed to keep your business in front of people to inform, engage and share. You can communicate the cupcake flavor of the day, or engage by decorating themed cupcakes for holidays, contests or partnering with local events to capture the attention of the community.

Twitter is like a mini blog allowing you to send a message burst 140 characters in length at a time.  People can follow your business on Twitter and your business can follow others.  This allows you to read, reply to and easily share tweets with your followers (retweet).  In a post, you may link content to a URL, video or photo, so it is ideal for driving traffic to your website or blog.  Being a local business, Yumazing can leverage Twitter’s Advanced Search feature to find potential customers that work or live near your business by identifying location by city or zip code.

Instagram is growing at a rate of more than 100 million new users per year (Reed, 2013). Instagram structures content locally through two methods; first, users can activate location through the Photo Map feature. This attaches a geocode to each piece of content, giving users the ability to view their photos and videos on a map and providing vital context to these precious moments and experiences. Secondly, users can “location tag” content, which attaches the explicit place where the photo or video was taken (Reed, 2013).  What does this mean for a small business?  One might share a picture of their cupcake, share an event where they are eating the featured cupcake or take a video of a cupcake review.  These occurrences infuse the content they share with local relevance, and for many, the Facebook page becomes the distribution channel then shares with a wider pool of friends on two platforms.

YouTube, the number one search engine on the web.  What’s the adage?  A picture is worth 1,000 words, however, video can tell you so much more.  YouTube makes it so easy to upload, share and embed video. Yumazing can benefit from YouTube by sharing local or media events, giving behind the scenes footage of how they get that peanut butter center in their chocolate cupcake or a testimonial from someone significant.

Tips for success

Maintaining a social media plan is not small potatoes. Keeping up with the latest features of each platform, understanding how devices work with them and building a content calendar that aligns with your business objectives is a continual, dynamic process.  It is vital that your brand presence across each social platform you participate maintain the same look and feel to help people identify your business and build trust (Kingston, 2013).

Now you have a content calendar, you are seeing likes, comments, retweets and shares and feeling pretty good about your efforts. So you think I have this social media thing in the bag?  We’ll, not quite.  The key to making the most of social media is listening to what your audience has to say about you, analyzing the data and using these insights to know your customers better to improve your marketing strategy (Brandwatch, n.d.). Some free tools include Google Analytics and Wildfire – you can also use HootSuite to automate and measure the engagement of your activity.  If you can get yourself in the routine of building your content calendar based on what you have learned through your analytics, you can identify what types of posts result in the most stickiness and deliver on what your followers desire.   

Measuring Unique Web Visits

The number of unique visitors is a fundamental metric of Web analytics. These days, it's still used to measure the overall level of traffic to a site and is particularly important for those sites that are dependent on advertising revenues as a major source of income (Mason, 2010). Kaushik defines unique visitors as “The first time someone visits your site a first party persistent cookie is set in their browser. This cookie lasts any where from several months to several years. Each time that person visits your site that cookie identifies them as the same browser” or a simpler definition is “a count of all the unique cookie_id’s during a given time period.”

A unique visitor count is always associated with a time period (most often day, week,

or month), and it is a “non-additive” metric. This means that unique visitors can not

be added together over time, over page views, or over groups of content, because

one visitor can view multiple pages or make multiple visits in the time frame studied.

Their activity will be over-represented unless they are de-duplicated (WAA, n.d.).

The deletion of cookies, whether 1st party or 3rd party, will cause unique visitors to

be inflated over the actual number of people visiting the site (WAA, n.d.). Users that block cookies may or may not be counted as unique visitors, and this metric is handled in different ways depending on the analytics tool used.

One must know how your tracking software is defining visitors, so that you can then make accurate use of the data especially when comparing with other tools or reports.  Once you know how they are defined and can test the accuracy of the actual measurement, it is a good idea to study the data to find gaps, exceptions and errors that occur using these definitions and what impact they have on your numbers, and hopefully be able correct or account for these when reporting results.

Sounds simple enough, but the fact is that most software that tracks your visitors has different definitions of what defines and how to measure a unique visitor.  There are three major components to defining and measuring unique visits (ACS, 2009).

 

1.         How do you identify a visit as unique?

2.         Over what time period do you use to begin and end uniqueness?

3.         How do you measure it?

The measurement issue comes into play when a consumer visits the website a second time and either their device doesn't accept cookies, they have deleted the cookie, or they are using a new device or browser. The reality may be that they have visited that website before, but as far as the Web analytics system is concerned, the user doesn't have a cookie on their device and so it will treat them as a new visitor. As a result, the proportion of visitors who are considered to be new is generally an overestimate (Mason, 2010).

Image courtesy of Econsultancy

Google Analytics revealed a work-in-process solution last Spring (2013) that it would have the ability to track unique visitors using multiple devices with a single client ID working off the backbone of Google Universal Analytics (Brown, 2013).  While the mapping for Android and other devices has been outlined, we will need to stay tuned to see how they plan on handling Apple iOS to stitch the devices under a single ID.

On a lighter note, view this short video on WTMD (Way Too Many Devices) to see a parody on device overload and tracking unique visitors.

Understanding Engagement through Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is a meaningful way to measure the quality of traffic coming to your website and is almost instantly accessible in any web analytics tool.

In a nutshell, bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors who leave after visiting the first page they visit. Bounce Rate was designed to tell you if you have the right audience coming to your pages and if you are meeting their expectations. 

To understand bounce rate, it is important to understand the difference between bounce rate and exit rate. Exit rate is a way to identify where people are exiting mid-stream from your conversion funnel (Kaushik, 2014) - are they leaving at shipping charges page or the billing confirmation page?

Thought about from a customer perspective rather than I came, I saw, I conquered, the action is I came, I saw, Yuck, I am out of here (Kaushik, 2013).  However, it can also mean I came to your website, quickly realized that you open at 9:00 am and I’m on my way, so be mindful of the entry and content possibilities.

To be clear on what identifies a bounce rate from your site, these four visitor actions will be identified as a bounce from your site and typically signal that the visitor’s expectations were unmet (Kelly, 2012).

1.         Clicks the back button (most common)

2.         Closes the browser (window/tab)

3.         Types a new URL

4.         Does nothing (session times out after 30min)

A high bounce rate is acceptable for pages like Contact Us, Checkout and Customer Support Pages.  In these scenarios, a marketer can embrace a high bounce rate knowing they came, found what they wanted quickly and left.

In the below scenario the bounce rate is 63%, but only 13% of visits exit on this page.  Considering that this page is not a primary entry point and is a supporting tertiary shopping funnel page, we are more concerned with people exiting at this point versus bouncing.  And approximately 1 out of 10 people exiting, is actually great on this high commitment page (Kelly, 2012)

Courtesy of Blast Analytics Marketing

In order to reduce bounce rate, it’s important to set up user expectations through the content. A few basic web design best practices to lower your bounce rate include:

• Avoid pop-up ads, animation or anything to interrupt a users clear path to find the information they need.        

• Make sure your message is clear and your site is easy to navigate, so visitors can find the information they need quickly.

• Optimize your site content and images so information loads fast. If your visitors have to wait even seconds too long they will look elsewhere for their information.

• If people are entering your site with tablets and smart phones, ensure you invest in responsive design, so the site is easy to navigate using devices.

An average bounce rate is about 40 percent to 50 percent (Google Analytics, 2014), but this percentage range is meaningless because what constitutes a good bounce rate varies by brand, industry, type of site, segment, customer lifecycle and user intent (Hartwig, 2013).

Morra Aarons-Mele, founder of the digital cause marketing agency reminds us that consumers live in their feeds, and that is a golden opportunity for brands. "Use social media content to engage people, and keep them informed and entertained. But when you really need to reach them — use email and social media. This way, you can get your content out to people without having to rely on them coming to your site of their own volition, and probably 'bouncing' off” (Hartwig, 2012).