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Most likely you are working to reduce your bounce rate and may have even performed some split testing to improve your conversion ratio. But do you know the deeply rich and valuable wealth of data available through Google analytics if you just have the necessary knowledge to tease it out? Is the keyword you are spending money on SEO giving you the highest possible return? Perhaps you think your head term is bringing in a large portion of your revenue. Is that true? How are your long tail visitors performing? If you quantify the ROI for each, are you allocating your resources properly? Are there long tail keywords that are at the bottom of the funnel that have a greater ROI than your head terms? These, and other similar answers, await you in your Google Analytics account....
Social Media has had a terrific ride for the past several years, but the days of easy growth are gone. In fact, the days of easy anything in social are behind us. For many brands, 2013 will be a year of social media disappointment.
With so many consumers spending so much time in social media and expecting so much of brands, our investments in social will continue to grow, but that does not mean our results will grow, at least in easily measurable ways. Certainly, all of our brands will earn more fans, see more comments and collect more retweets, but we all know this is no longer enough--our bosses want to know the business results we are delivering, and fans simply are not a business benchmark.
Success in 2013, more than ever, will be measured in difficult metrics and not easy ones, and increasingly, it will come not just from the Marketing department but from every corner of the enterprise. To succeed in 2013 and beyond, organizations must recognize how social media is altering the way we live, work and conduct business and not just the way we kill time on Facebook.
Here is where (I believe) social will grow and where it will stumble and stagnate in 2013...
Social media duties are treated more as add-on job functions, and don’t often get a dedicated internal team, details a [download page] new Ragan/NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions survey. 65% of the survey respondents – the majority of whom hail from organizations that employ more than 100 people – said that social media tasks are assigned on top of current job responsibilities. 27% said they have an internal team that works exclusively on social media, while an additional 5% said they have both an internal department and use an outside agency or partner. Just 3% said they fully outsource all their social media efforts. That 3% figure reflects an apparent unwillingness to spend dollars – rather than time – on social media, a trend that was found by Reply! recently, in research examining SMB use of paid social media services.
The Ragan survey found that when it comes to tools used to measure social media, a 59% majority rely on free tools, while 35% use a combination of free and paid tools. Only 6% use only paid tools, the most popular of which are Hootsuite (31%), Radian6 (25%), and Vocus (17%). (Among free tools, Google Analytics and Google Alerts both easily lead all others.)...
...The report says people are getting some optimism back, although their buying habits -- particularly those of 20- to 30-year-olds -- are going to be radically different. The report lists 13 "microtrends." First on the list is trust, or "trust is the new black." Gerzema said there has been a 50% decline in trust since 2001, but a 35% rise in trust as a driver of brand equity. That suggests there's an opportunity for brands that open their arms wide and say, "Here I am with all my blemishes." "Customers want a reason to believe and brands who give them that will be better off," said Connelly. Gerin said MasterCard is doing just fine in that category -- as she said the brand is 87% more trusted than any other brand of any kind. McCracken said trust matters in a "black swan" world full of disruptive competitors. "The last 20 years have been a chronicle of brands behaving badly," he said. "The name of the game is absolute transparency." The good news for established brands is that assuming they have not been behaving badly, they have equity, while new competitors have nothing but VC money. To achieve trust equity functionally, the "front" of a company -- its brand, communications, what it claims to be -- must match the back, the invisible side, where it does what it actually does.... [Very interesting trend report for marketing and PR ~ Jeff]
Eloqua has teamed up with infographic design firm JESS3 again to create Modern Marketing Insights, a series of 40 infographics using big data analysis that can help marketers anywhere. Did you know that dynamic content can improve conversions by 50%? Or that emails sent on a Saturday get the highest number of click-throughs? Were you aware that when influencers share your content on social it can result in a dramatic increase in traffic and conversions? That’s why we produce a chart every week that modern marketers can easily learn from and use. And it’s why we’ve gone back with our friends at JESS3 to reproduce the most indispensable data points, coming up with 40 understandable, actionable charts. Wide-ranging in scope, the charts hit the most important topics hitting marketers today – from social media to email.... [What a terrific marketing, social media resource! ~ Jeff]
Social media statistics from The Social Habit by Edison Research includes several very interesting data points about Facebook, Twitter and beyond. You think social media is reaching maturity, and the whipsaw behavioral shifts that change like a Dwight Howard trade request are things of the past? Uhhh, no. Released yesterday at Blogworld New York, findings from social media behavioral researcher Tom Webster and the team at Edison Research show some shocking changes in how Americans use and consume social media. You can access the entire presentation at The Social Habit microsite, but 11 social media statistics in particular stood out for me. Two quick notes: This is not data dredging. This is real, random sample, tightly controlled research from the same company that is the exclusive provider of Presidential exit polls in the USA.... [There were some social media research surprises worth noting ~ Jeff]
Retailers are mining personal data to learn everything about you so they can help you help yourself to their products. Black Thriday is over. So is Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday. Today, in case you didn’t know, is either Green Tuesday or Giving Tuesday, depending on whether you feel like eco-shopping or giving to charity. Not sure what tomorrow may bring (How about Weird Relative Gift Wednesday?), but I suppose shopping does feel less chaotic if someone’s organizing it into theme days, although that doesn’t always stop it from devolving into a contact sport. Can you imagine American shoppers embracing something like iButterfly, a mobile app popular in Asia where customers earn coupons by tracking down virtual butterflies with their smartphones? Me neither. In the U.S., it’s about cutting to the chase and here the chase is after the sweetest deals, pure and simple, without having to bother with running after faux flying insects. And retailers have ratcheted up the competition, using the latest tracking technology to closely monitor their competitors’ pricing decisions and undercut them, in close to real-time, on their own websites. When Best Buy, for instance, published advertising saying it would be selling a $1,500 Nikon camera for $1,000, Amazon responded on Thanksgiving morning by cutting its price for the same camera to $997.... [Smithsonian offers a valuable marketing context for Black Friday shopping phenomena ~ Jeff]
It’s hard to escape hearing about social marketing platforms being acquired by major tech players these days. In May, Oracle purchased Vitrue for $300 million, in June, Salesforce scooped up Buddy Media for $689 million, and in July, Google joined in, acquiring Wildfire for $250 million. In the past year we’ve reached an inflection point within the social marketing industry. With these three tech giants gobbling up companies, it doesn’t seem to be slowing down--but what comes next?... [Fascinating look at social media's three key phrases: social listening; social management and the future which is collaborative marketing. Recommended reading. ~ Jeff]
With so much data swimming around, knowing which metrics to pay attention to can be difficult. Knowing which ones matter to your company and which ones are simply vanity metrics is important if you are to improve your social media efforts... No matter what industry you’re in, data will always play a key part. Data provides certainly and cold, hard facts that can help businesses thrive. It’s no surprise that by their very nature, the Web and social media have sped up the progress of analytic tools, becoming faster and more accurate. It’s why the majority of social media sites offer up their own analytics tools and why there are many so many are looking for real stats to work from.
Yet sometimes having a lot of data at your fingertips can be a hindrance. Our analytics can be filled with so much data that it can be difficult to determine what data is useful. It can be dangerous to take one metric on its own at face value so a combination of different metrics can help paint a picture of how well your social media activity is going.
Type of Metrics
There are a number of different engagement types out there, but here are the ones you should keep in mind when you’re devising a strategy....
[Simply Zesty provides an excellent overview of social media measurement metrics. If you're serious about measuring ROI, this is a must-read. ~ Jeff]
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Web application performance monitoring company New Relic studied some 42 billion page views. Because many tech savvy sites use New Relic to improve performance, this data provides not just an indicator of where users are today, but where they’re going. Companies like Google and Facebook have had access to vast amounts of data on how consumers behave on the web for years. Now you can get access to this same kind of Big Data, even if you don’t have their scale. Here are four key insights from the Quarterly Web And Mobile Benchmark...
Are you addicted to white papers, just as I am? Well, my friends at Awareness, Inc. have put together an epic list of the top 10 social media whitepapers of 2012. Enjoy the white paper goodness. To help you understand important shifts in the social media landscape and how they affect marketing, Awareness Inc combed through the juiciest research findings from 2012, pulling out 10 studies and 30 essential takeaways for any successful marketer and created a guide to help you with them. The ten white papers included are...
Business is a warzone: If you stand still, you die. No matter how good your product or service, you’re at the mercy of cause and effect. The market’s evolving needs must be met by evolving products. ...But perhaps companies like Microsoft aren’t like yours? They deal in products that constantly change and have a short shelf life; change and fluidity are normal in their particular market.
So what happens when you’re not one of these companies? How do you deal with the speed at which social media and the spread of connected devices has changed the balance of power between a company and its customers and made it difficult to market using traditional advertising tools?... In the transition from Jerome McCarthy’s 4Ps of Product, Place, Price and Promotion to what he calls the 4Es of Experience, Everyplace, Exchange and Evangelism, we also see the morphing of traditional businesses into social ones... [This is a really thoughtful article on how business must evolved from traditional into social business models ~ Jeff]
According to stats-meister Nielsen, in July 2012, US consumers spent 121 billion minutes navigating the shark-infested waters of social media. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and the rest — up 37% from July 2011 and that’s quite a feat. The majority of the time was spent using a traditional computer, but look at mobile. The larger square represents Apps, the smaller, cell phone looking icon represents browser use through a mobile device. Together, they show a 63% increase over last year.
Breaking the numbers down, Nielsen found that women were responsible for most of the social media usage both on the PCA and through mobile. Ages 18-24 ate up the most minutes on the PC but Ages 25-34 snuck ahead on the mobile site, but not by much. Ethnically, speaking Hispanics were way out in front on mobile usage with PC usage being fairly evenly divided.
[Valuable insight into social media trends and booming mobile sector for marketers, social media, PR pros ~ Jeff]
As we prepare to downshift our minds for the holidays I thought it might be fun to create a snapshot of what brands that succeed in 2013 will look like. As we prepare to downshift our minds for the holidays I thought it might be fun to create a snapshot of what brands that succeed in 2013 will look like. It may help to orientate our minds as they do a lot of important unconscious work over the holiday break. Its so rare these days that we actually allow ourselves sufficient time to integrate the firehouse of information we each receive every day. Treat it as a checklist and ask yourself, on a scale of 1-10, how well your brand embodies each of these ten characteristics.... [A must read for marketers, PR and content pros ~ Jeff]
As content creators look to keep audiences interested and clicking on more assets, they would do well to consider audience composition, as research suggests demographics can have a substantial effect on how web users behave once they have found interesting content. Research from content optimization firm nRelate shows that age is one major factor in how users engage with content online. An October 2012 survey found that younger US web users, especially younger males, had a high propensity to click on related articles and videos after reading online content. Older users tended to click on links to related content on a weekly basis, and women—especially older women—were more likely to be drawn to a story that featured a photo.... [Useful social marketing insight ~ Jeff]
Instagram is most definitely its own beast. Businesses thinking they can parlay a Pinterest strategy into Instagram will be sorely mistaken, thanks to strikingly different user engagement styles on the two platforms. Without clear “transactional” support, Instagram is proving to be much more about brand building and brand allegiance. If your company doesn't hold the term "brand" highly, simply stay off Instagram for now -- there are other platforms more worth your transactional-based time. However, for the brand-conscience, recent metrics show Instagram might be a worthwhile marketing tool.... [Bryan Boettger offers insight into marketing on Instagram ~ Jeff]
IBM asked CEOs all over the world what they believe is going to happen with social media for the next three to five years. What they had to say was revealing. “For the first time in my career, I feel old. People in their 20s work and think about this social stuff in a different way,” a U.K. insurance industry CEO shared. “We’re using it as a way of connecting with friends and socializing; the kids coming up are using it as a way of life.”
But do most CEOs acknowledge what is happening with social?
Over half of the CEOs "expect social channels to be a primary way of engaging customers." [But are they committing resources and does social improve the bottom line? ~ Jeff]
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Are you new to search engine analytics or maybe you just need an SEO tune up? Marcela De Vivo's extensive primer is for you. it's one of the best overviews I've seen for some time. So dive in, learn, measure and get better social media results!