Building a social media audience is not an easy task. It takes dedicated time to find fans and followers and even more time to experiment with sharing the right types of content that will earn Likes, RTs and +1s.
With social media, one size does not fit all. Every platform has different strengths and weaknesses and audience building tactics that work well on Facebook, for example, may not work on Twitter, and vice versa.
Below are tips for building an audience on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
Best Practices for Building an Audience on Facebook
Best For: engaging on a more personal level, communities, causes.
Content to Share: videos, photos, blog posts, events, campaigns, ask questions, ask for likes and opinions.
Tip #2: Growing your Facebook fan base increases interactions. Facebook ads are one way to promote your Page to potential fans as well as to friends of your fans.
Tip #3:Facebook insights can help you understand who your audience is and what they are engaging with on your page.
Best Practices for Building an Audience on Twitter
Best For: updates, news, customer service, answering questions, finding people and subjects of interest to follow, conferences.
Content to Share: news, articles and links to content relevant to your audience, hashtags.
Measuring the value of your marketing efforts is a constant struggle for businesses because there are so many factors that indirectly affect sales. On top of that, online marketing can drive offline sales and offline marketing can drive online sales. All of these factors make it difficult to really know what is influencing a sale. That said, Goals and Custom Reports in Google Analytics can give you insights into the two things that the people holding the marketing purse strings care about:
Sales
Things That Lead to Sales
Sales are the macro conversions—the big hairy, totally awesome goal—while “Things That Lead to Sales” are the micro conversions—the precursors to a sale. These micro conversions have a non-financial impact (gaining a new Twitter follower, a Facebook like, a new email subscriber) but they are all the things that help us understand what influences a purchase decision. That’s why when it comes to conversions, you want to follow Dave McClure’s advice and think like a pirate—AARRR!
THINGS THAT LEAD TO SALES
Acquisition: How did visitors get to your site (search, referral, direct), how many visitors came from each source, did they bounce?
Activation: What are your visitors’ on-site behaviours: number of pages viewed? Repeat visits? Do they sign up (newsletter, email, membership, subscription)? Do they/are they a social media fan or follower?
Retention: Do you capture their attention (email opens, click throughs)? Does your content keep them interested (repeat visits)?
Referral: Do your visitors love you so much they tell other people about you? Blog and media mentions, retweets, +1s, social sharing? AND, do they tell other people who then also sign up, like, follow, refer, buy, etc.?
A funnel represents the path that you expect visitors to take on their way to converting to a sale. It’s a defined set of steps or pages in the checkout process. For example, I view My Cart. I click Go to Checkout. I Complete My Order. A Goal Funnel shows the funnel conversion rate, as well as the points along the path where a visitor abandons the task. Funnels are important for non-ecommerce goals as well, such as email newsletter signups or whitepaper downloads. Goals and Goal Funnels will tell you the conversion rate for the macro goal so you can do some forecasting and they will help you understand what steps in the process need to be optimized.
Once you have Goals and Goal Funnels set up in Google Analytics, then it’s time to create some Custom Reports that will tell you even more information about those micro conversions—things that lead to a sale—like website visitors, time on site, number of pageviews, sign ups, click throughs, repeat visits and referrals.
Setting Up Custom Reports
I call this my “What Does Success Look Like” Report because it quickly tells me what channels generate the most conversions and the most valuable conversions, as well as the conversion rate, and the bounce rate for my various marketing channels. You can see in the example report that the Goal Completions number only tells part of the story, whereas Goal Completions + the Goal Conversion Rate provide greater insight into which channels could be better leveraged.
Above you can see that Facebook generated 9 Sales and Twitter (t.co) generated 14 sales. Instead of making a judgement based only on Goal Completions, and assuming that Twitter is the better performing channel, you can look also at the Conversion Rate. Facebook traffic converts at 9.09% whereas Twitter only converts at 6.64%. The Site Performance Report would suggest that a little experiment is in order. If you can double the Facebook traffic, will the conversion rate stay the same? i.e., instead of 99 visitors a week from Facebook, could you get 198 visitors and therefore 17 sales? Of course, there are many factors, such as time, to also consider, but the point is that using only 1 data point limits your view of the opportunities.
How Do You Set Up a Custom Report in Google Analytics
Log into Google Analytics
In the top navigation, click on Custom Reporting
Click New Custom Report
Label your report and name the report tab
Click on the blue Add Metric box to add your KPIs (key performance indicators) and select the relevant fields from the dropdown menu. These metrics will make up the columns of your grid.
Click on the green Add Dimension box to create a hierarchy or drilldown structure. For example, if you are running a banner ad campaign, you may want the top-level reporting to show that the source/medium is referral traffic from the National Post, but if you have more than 1 banner image/copy, then you may want to drilldown to see what ad specifically is sending traffic to the site. Same with Google Adwords campaigns, you may want to see what Campaign, Ad Group and Keywords are performing best.
You’ll be prompted to select a Google Analytics profile then the report will appear in the Custom Report tab for that profile. You can then click Edit to adjust the report to include the Goals relevant to your site.
As online marketing continues to mature, it’s even more important to understand how to extract the social metrics and business metrics from Google Analytics in order to understand the value your marketing activities have on the business’ financial health. Be ready next time your manager asks if you know what’s working.
Step 1: Pick Good Goals
Step 2: Set up Goals in Google Analytics
Step 3: Create a Custom Report
Step 4: Experience the Awesome
Need help with Step 1: Pick Good Goals? (Blip.tv) Slides+Audio from my BookNet Canada presentation “Beyond Fans and Followers: Measuring Your Online Marketing Campaigns,” which looks at the key performance metrics for a variety of common campaigns like running a contest, doing a discount promotion or reaching out to bloggers.
In the post, we outline 5 common web design mistakes that kill search engine optimization and why teamwork among SEOs, web designers, marketers and developers is critical during a blog redesign process.
Here are 5 design mistakes to avoid:
1. High-traffic pages are removed or deleted
2. Top-level keyword terms are omitted from new copy
3. The new design does not leave enough room for copy
4. The beautiful design takes longer to load
5. CMS changes affect URLs
Google+ Business Page set up is just like Facebook set up. It’s a place to connect with fans and colleagues and to discuss industry news and information with them.
Google+ Business Pages are also very important for search. Google is using information from Google+ profiles and pages to affect personalized search results, so using Google+ can help your visibility in some cases.
Ready? Here’s how to set up a Google+ Business Page:
Note: Similar to Facebook, you cannot create a profile for a non-human entity like a business, you must create a page. In addition, Google+ pages require that a personal profile be the owner of the page.
Add Managers To Your Google+ Business Page
Once your page is set up, you can add managers. Each page can have 1 owner and up to 50 managers. The difference between owners and managers is that owners have the ability to transfer ownership and delete the page.
Fill Out Your Google+ About Page
As we mentioned above, Google+ plays (and will increasingly play) an important role in search. This means that it is crucial to completely fill out your About page using keyword-optimized content:
Add a short profile description under the name of your page. Use 3-4 keywords that best describe what your business does.
Fill out the Introduction using keywords your business wants to rank for in search results.
Completely fill out the Contact info and Website sections, making sure this content is accurate.
Add Custom Links to your various online platforms—this can include your website, Facebook page, Twitter profile and LinkedIn page.
Promote Your Google+ Business Page
Pages can’t add individuals to circles, instead, individuals must find and add you to their circles. This makes it difficult to promote your Google+ Business Page. Despite this, here are some ways to build up the number of people in your circles.
Spread the Word
When you’re logged into your Google+ Business Page, click on the Spread the word button. This shares your page with people in your personal Google+ circles. Note: this post will come from your personal profile, not from the Google+ Page. In addition, you should promote your Google+ Business Page on your other social networks and encourage your fans and followers to join you on Google.
Add the Google+ Badge to Your Website
Once you’ve linked your website to your Google+ Business Page (under custom links), then link your website to your Google+ Page. Here’s how Google suggests doing that.
Add The +1 Button To Your Site
The +1 button is a way for customers and fans to recommend your blog posts, which makes your listing standout more in search results. You can add the button to your website using AddThis (where you can also add other social sharing buttons, such as Facebook and Twitter) or through a script generated by Google.
Post Content
Post often on your stream and make sure these posts are public. People are more likely to notice you and add you to their circles if you have an active page.
UPDATE
Still not convinced that you should set up a Google+ Business page? Watch this 1 Minute Marketing video with Monique Sherrett on why now is the time to get on Google+:
In October, Facebook launched a new version of Facebook Page Insights and they continue to make changes to Page features and available metrics. If you haven’t visited your Facebook Page for awhile here are some things to keep in mind.
1. “Notes” no longer pulls in your blog feed. This feature was disabled as of Nov 22 so if you set up a bunch of automated functions, you’ll need to consider manually posting to Notes or using a third-party app.
2. New metrics are available in Insights. In particular, instead of “impressions” you’ll now see “virality”. Instead of the number of times your story was viewed (impressions), the metric is now the number of times your story was viewed and talked about (virality).
What is considered “talking about” a story?
“People Talking About This” is a number publicly displayed on your Page for all fans and potential fans to see. It is the number of people who engage with your Page by:
Liking your Page
Liking content
Commenting on or sharing a post from your Page
Answering a Question using the Questions feature
Tagging your Page in an update or in a photo, and
Responding to an event on your Page.
Virality is a conversion rate. It is the percent of people who saw a story from your Page and “talked about it”.
(Think about this as your Facebook garden: # seeds that sprouted divided by # seeds planted.)
Tip for Virality
Posts between 100 and 200 characters (less than 3 lines of text) receive about 60% more likes, comments and shares than posts greater than 250 characters.
What’s the difference between Engaged Users and People Talking About This?
All People Talking About This are engaged, but not all Engaged Users are talking about your story. Not everyone takes one of the actions noted above. Engaged Users will be a number greater than People Talking About This.
In addition to Talking About and Virality, Facebook metrics include:
Friends of Fans - Total number of friends all your fans have (potential reach for your story).
Reach - The actual number of people who have seen stories associated with your Page.
One thing to note: The subset of data for Likes, Reach and Talking About This also provides info on demographics and total reach.
There are 3 ways to reach people:
Organic: fans of your page who see content
Paid: people who see your sponsored ads, and
Viral: friends of fans who see your content because a friend shares it or you target them via sponsored ads
Total Reach does not add up to the number of organic, paid and viral reach numbers.
Total Reach is the number of unique people who see your content since 1 person can be reached in multiple ways (i.e., see a sponsored ad and see an organic post).
Tip on Reach
Localize your posts using the geo-targeting feature to make sure that only the people who find your story valuable will see it. For example, if you are announcing an event in Vancouver, target your fans who live in Vancouver. Geo-targeting is found in the Public dropdown menu of the “Write Something” field.
Facebook has a 20-minute interactive course that outlines all the features. Yes, Insights is complicated enough that watching the 20-minutes is worthwhile. If the intro is boring for you, just skip to section #3 Dashboard Features. The rest moves quickly from there.
Monthly Newsletter
Conferences & Events
In October, Facebook launched a new version of Facebook Page Insights and they continue to make changes to Page features and available metrics. If you haven’t visited your Facebook Page for awhile here are some things to keep in mind. 
What we’re talking about 
Project Highlights
Did you know?
Vancouver internet marketing strategists 
Looking for the bee? 
Subscribe to our blog.