Google Analytics Social Reports Provide Huge Metrics Edge
Posted on 22. May, 2012 by Lisa Barone in Blog, Google Analytics, Lisa Barone, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media measurement
Don’t get me wrong – I’ve been known to spend a few too many minutes trolling Twitter and Facebook on personal time. You have, too. But when it comes to business, I’m not playing around. I’m not on social media to kill time; I’m there to build a business and find my customers. And the ability to make data-based decisions and assign ROI to social actions is what enables me to do that.
I recently waved Goodbye PostRank, Hello Google Social Reports at SmallBizTrends, breaking out five new reports designed to help you keep track of valuable social media insights. Today I want to hone in on three of those reports and show you how to use them to create a delicious, ROI-filled meal.
First, let’s be honest. As buzz-y as social media has been over the past few years, it’s also been an elusive beast for marketers trying to track and attribute a hard ROI.
Why? Well for starters…
- Off-site engagement is more difficult to measure than on-site engagement.
- We don’t immediately know where social media sits in our conversion funnel – top funnel or bottom funnel?
- We lacked a uniform way to compare activity on different social media sites.
- We tried to create “new” definitions for ROI instead of focusing on the one metric that trumps all – money.
The result was a lot of frustration and wasted dollars when we weren’t sure what was working in social and where our time was best invested. Thankfully, with the new Social reports from Google, we glean a lot more insights. But only if we’re looking in the right areas.
The Overview Report
The Overview Report offers you a quick snapshot of where, exactly, on your Web site you’re making money. But to best use it, you must have Goals set up in Google Analytics.
If you’re unfamiliar, a Goal is a way to measure business objectives for your Web site. To be valid, it must correspond to a measurable action that visitors on your site will perform. While a conversion is an obvious goal, you also want to focus on micro-goals or the actions that lead to conversions. A micro-goal could be downloading an eBook, signing up for a webinar, or a user viewing five+ pages on your site. When you’re identifying goals, remember that each Goal must contain three things: A business objective, a visitor action, and a measurable success metric.
With your Goals set up, you’ll be able to look at this Overview Report and identify where you’re making money. You’ll be able to see the total amount of conversions, plus how many of those conversions were Assisted Social Conversions (top funnel) vs Last Interaction Conversions (bottom funnel).
Assisted Conversions [light blue]: When someone visits your site, leaves without converting, but converts later during a subsequent visit.
Last Interaction Conversions [dark blue]: When someone visits your site and converts, the visit is considered a last click.
This will give insight into whether social is helping to start the conversation about your brand or whether it’s closing the deal. You’ll also be able to see which networks are better for lower funnel vs which are better for generating overall traffic. This should be used to guide the rest of your social media efforts and identify the sites most important to your bottom line.
The Conversions Report
The Social Conversions Report allows you to measure the success of your social campaigns by breaking them down by network and then aligning them with your on-site goals, conversions and ecommerce transactions. In doing this, marketers can see which networks deliver the highest bottom-line impact, and where they need a social strategy re-haul.
Essentially, the Holy Grail of social media success can be found here. You’re welcome.
Joking aside, if you’ve ever had to look your boss (or yourself) in the eye and justify why you’re spending time on social media, now you have a report to make your case. Assuming you have one. If you don’t, well, now you know that too.
Let’s take a look at Social Conversion report data for Convince & Convert.
The graph above gives us the number of conversions attributed to social, the bottom-line dollar value, and then breaks it down further (below) to show which networks are bringing in the most conversion value to your Web site.
That’s a hard number you can take your CEO when he wants to know why he should keep giving you money to invest into social media. You’re also able to break networks down by Assisted vs. Last Interaction to, again, see which networks are most effective at which stage in your user’s conversion cycle.
Marketers should use this report to identify which networks bring the most ROI and to determine what type of campaigns will be most effective on which network.
The Social Sources Report
As a marketer, this is my favorite report in the new Social suite because it identifies the networks and communities visitors are using to engage with your content and then lets you see how people interact based on where they came from. As a marketer, a content producer and a lover of social, this report rocks my world by giving me a better sense of where I should be devoting resources.
For example, maybe a Fictional Jay Baer woke up this morning and decided he wanted to write off Google+ from his marketing strategy and focus on Twitter. But before he does, he’s going to take a look at his analytics “just to check”. He sees that while Twitter sends more traffic, users only spend ~3:30 minutes on this Convince & Convert post on social media time savers vs. Google+ users who average nearly 7 minutes.
By digging further, he notices this is a trend – users from Google+ engage with content for longer periods of time and they’re more likely to dig into other pages on the site. Based on his analytics, Fictional Jay also knows that a visitor who views five or more pages converts at a 30 percent higher rate. Fictional Jay likes how Google+ puts users on a stronger conversion path. Fictional Jay decides not to kill Google+, but realizes the sites can’t be used the same. Twitter is a top-funnel network, while Google+ is a bottom-funnel with more engaged traffic and more conversions. It needs a different strategy.
The data inspires informed action. Fictional Jay makes boatloads of new monies.
But this report doesn’t stop there.
By tapping into Google’s Data Hubs and viewing the Activities Stream tab for Google+, marketers get an interactive look at how their content is being shared on Google’s social network. This allows businesses to quickly identify their top content and find key influencers. For marketers looking to build larger engagement plans or identify brand advocates, this is an extremely powerful way to gain insight into how your content is being shared across Google. You’re able to see who is starting the conversations about your brand, what they’re saying when they share it, and then gain direct access to these people via URL Ripples and URL Trackbacks.
For example, maybe I’m Jay and I’m working to create a list of brand advocates that I can reach out to about his book or a webinar coming up. I head into the Activities Stream for Google+ and see everyone who is talking about Jay on Google+.
Once I select a post, I can choose to View Activity to see that mention in the wild or View Ripple to see the conversation spread. I choose View Activity and I’m immediately taken to the page where the mention occurred.
From here I can interact, I can say hello, and I can use that mention to start a larger conversation. It’s a Google Alert directly in your Analytics.
Marketers should use the Social Sources report to understand which networks mean the most to ROI and get an idea of the content that should be created for each. The Activities Stream can also be used to give context to the share so you can see how specific users share your content.
Above are some of the ways I believe marketers can benefit from the new Google Social reports. Have you given them a whirl yet?
About the Lisa Barone:
Lisa Barone is a writer, content marketer and social media strategist. She’s most known for saving brands (most often from themselves) and for her voracious tweeting. You can follow her on Twitter at @lisabarone or find her blogging about her own struggles with voice at VoiceInterrupted.com.
Google Analytics Social Reports Provide Huge Metrics Edge is a post from: Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting
The Most Overrated Social Media Metric
Posted on 05. May, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media measurement, social media metrics, Web Analytics
Do you sell advertising on your website? No? Then why are you so excited about your website traffic?
Late in the third quarter it's Pinterest 17, Facebook 13.
The most overrated social media metric is traffic from social outposts.
This blog post is symptomatic of this problem, although there have been hundreds (thousands?) like it. Here’s the highlight:
With only 1% of Facebook’s user count, Pinterest sends 13% of the traffic that Facebook does.
Pinterest has spawned a new way of consuming and searching information, and may be the poster child for the coming image-centric social Web that will make written blogs like mine look quaintly Amish by 2014. But to make the case that Pinterest should be a big part of your marketing arsenal because it proportionally sends more traffic to your website than Facebook or Twitter is patently ridiculous.
Don’t Forget This:
You are in the behavior business, not the eyeballs business.
The Social Media Metrics That Matter
When determining the value of your social media efforts, and certainly when calculating your ROI, you must focus on behavior, not aggregation. Almost always, numbers that count steadily upward (like number of fans, number of visitors, etc.) are inferior to ratios and percentages that measure behavior.
Knowing that Pinterest sends a ton of traffic to your site should CREATE questions in your company, not answer them.
- Do your visitors from Pinterest engage in desirable, profitable behaviors at a ratio equal to or better than Twitter or Facebook?
- Do they buy? Disproportionately so? Higher average order?
- Do they fill out lead forms? Disproportionately so? Better conversion rate?
- Do they look at high-value Web pages like product lists, pricing, customer testimonials? Disproportionately so?
- Do they subscribe to email updates? Disproportionately so? Better open and click-through rates downstream?
- Do they ever return to the site? Disproportionately so?
See more goodness at Some E Cards
Those are data points that are easily determined with web analytics and goal funnels, but are different for every company. All of these are vastly more important than the number of website visitors from Pinterest.
Is Pinterest More Like Google Than Facebook?
My hypothesis is that visitors from Pinterest will behave more like search-referred visitors, rather than visitors from Facebook and Twitter. This is because Pinterest (like Google) is about discovery, whereas the people who click links in Facebook and Twitter are often already familiar with the company in question.
I don’t know for sure, because even though I’m moderately active on Pinterest, I don’t see a ton of traffic from it because I almost always pin other people’s stuff rather than my own. We also use Pinterest as the curation hub for our daily One Social Thing email update. I don’t get enough Pinterest traffic to test the theory. I’d love to see someone with access to more analytics data tackle it.
Perhaps Pinterest isn’t the new Facebook, but the new Google? The same way that YouTube revolutionized video search, and Slideshare revolutionized presentation search, is Pinterest revolutionizing image search?
Maybe that’s the story, I’m not sure. But I definitely know that the story is NOT that Pinterest sends a bunch of traffic to your site. To that revelation I say “who cares”?
(Note: After this post ran, loyal reader Juan Barnett (@DCAutoGeek) created this awesome graphic. Enjoy!
About the Jay Baer: Jay Baer is a hype-free social media strategist & speaker, tequila guy, and co-author of The NOW Revolution. Jay is the founder of http://convinceandconvert.com and host of the Social Pros podcast.
The Most Overrated Social Media Metric is a post from: Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting
Social Networking Spam – 5 Rules for Marketers
Posted on 20. Mar, 2012 by Josh Mackey in Blog, email, facebook, Guest Posts, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media measurement, social networks, spam, Twitter
Josh Mackey is General Manager at PeekAnalytics, a Social Audience Measurement Platform. (More importantly, a family man and sport loving Aussie who loves life).
There has been a lot of talk recently about social networking spam – inactive and bogus accounts on social platforms. While I agree inactive and spam accounts can raise unwanted questions for platforms, these claims should not discourage marketers away from the platforms themselves. Instead of admitting that this “social thing” is not as easy as all that, some are pointing fingers at the platforms, saying SPAM! SPAM! Bad ROI…Spam! Bad CTR…Spam!
The rhetoric above might make for a great headline, but for me it’s lazy sensationalism. Anyone who claims that Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn or Facebook do not have robust ecosystems, full of amazing insights and opportunities for brands as well as individuals alike, is simply delusional. That said, marketers who face pushback on social networking spam issues need to be prepared to respond head on.
The advice below comes from insights that I have gleaned from being neck deep in social audience measurement product development for the past year and a half.
Rule #1 – Don’t mix the water with the wine.
Instead of focusing on the spam or inactive accounts, marketers should just accept there is some “spam” mixed in with the “bacon” on every platform, channel or network. It’s about finding tools, best in class techniques and smart marketers that will allow you to get to the bacon, “smell” the bacon, get to know the bacon, and in the end, get the bacon to buy your product and then tell their friends to also buy your product. Mmm bacon!
Don’t skew your analysis with incomplete data. You are better off dealing with a quality subset of audience data to analyze rather than a much larger mess of incomplete and questionable data. Set yourself up with a “minimum cutoff” point that excludes accounts out that don’t have a certain amount of information you require to form a complete analysis. A Twitter account with nothing more than an @name, sharing dating site links every hour on the hour, provides little usable data and obviously stinks of spam. Analyze your audience with a tool that allows you to filter out incomplete and junk accounts.
Rule #2 – Seek out real people.
Social Networking Spam – You Are What You Tweet
Go out of your way to engage with people who are transparent about their identity (I personally think Google+ has this right). Someone who unites their online and offline identity is much more likely to not only engage with people they have met offline (e.g. building stronger relationships), but will also generate a more trusted and larger network online than people using only fake identities and/or usernames. In very few cases do I trust a person or content when that is hiding behind a fake name with no digital footprint or identity. Unfortunately, many marketers have been duped and lured into buying followers from sketchy sites. Trust me: this is not the way to social media success and will only create a false economy by skewing your ROI metrics to unattainable levels.
Rule #3 – Engage with others as you would like to be engaged with.
Remember that a quality audience will always trump quantity. There are many theories that all you need on social media is “100 true fans” to get a message started. The definition of a true fan can be debated, but in reality, for the viral effect to happen, all you need is good content and a few raving fans who have trusted networks of their own for a message to go far and wide. Therefore, focus on building a community of people who will support you as you support them.
Rule #4 – Be humble and honest with yourself!
Take a realistic view of your audience. If you have 10,000 followers, don’t use 10,000 in your click through percentage calculations. Understand that some accounts are inactive, some are social networking spam, very few people sit on Twitter all day waiting for you to tweet. Use tools that try and measure the true size of your audience at any one time and tweet during hours that your audience is potentially awake, engaged, etc
Rule #5 – Remember and respect the meek! For the meek shall…also buy your products.
Every fan matters! 40% of active users don’t tweet! Find a tool that can measure your entire social audience and don’t just focus on the active (talking) audience. You have customers who have chosen to follow you (which may be the only action you see from them on Twitter) but they still have the ability to purchase your products after they read about a sale at the local store from your tweets!
Conclusion
Who doesn’t remember naysayers who claimed: “spam will kill email,” “IM is killing email,” “Social will kill email,” etc? Guess what: Just like the humble text message, email is fine; the value that it delivers for users and marketers remains because it is a powerful and imminently affordable communication platform. Twitter, Facebook, Google+ all have spam issues, no different than every other valuable communication platform that ever existed. Each platform is currently taking unique and aggressive steps to ensure the average user experience is not marred by spam. Social networking spam filters are still in the relatively early days, but big progress is being made.
The value is there; you just need to know where to look and how to create value and a reason for consumers to care about your brand. Get over the “spam” siren call and focus on finding the bacon! If you can’t or refuse to, please feel free to build a platform that is user friendly, has millions of users and is spam free…we will all come join your platform and make you super rich! It will be awesome. Really.
Social Engagement ROI & the Value of Exchange
Posted on 27. Feb, 2012 by Lee Odden in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social business, Social Media, social media measurement, social media ROI
How do you measure your online marketing performance? What are your goals, your KPIs and how do you measure ROI? These are pretty common questions in the world of social media marketing.
As companies evolve their people, process and technology to attract, engage and inspire customers through content, I think attention on a broader view of the value that is created warrants consideration.
Many companies that approach my agency ask about the ROI of specific tactics as if they are gambling money with a direct rate of return. If there are agencies contributing to that perspective amongst clients side marketers, I wish they would stop. It’s not helping anyone. Here’s why:
The underpinning of marketing is centered around presenting something of value to customers who hopefully exchange money for it. Many marketers use the notion of ROI to characterize the effect of their marketing investment. Of course it makes sense to understand what the return is on where you’re spending money. But I think traditional models of ROI (input – output) can miss the point of how much impact integrated search, social and content marketing can have on the overall customer relationship. Besides ROI, there are other cumulative effects that can amplify the effect of optimized online marketing efforts that are worth measuring.
Today’s digitally savvy customers are empowered to publish and prone to share their experiences with brands, friends and broader social networks. Consumer expectations of brands are evolving into participatory exchanges with multiple threads of dialog. What consumers want from socially savvy brands is not just about getting free coupons or unique content any more.
The brand / customer relationship is not just about marketing presenting offers to target customers. Brand points of contact are not limited to designated personnel in sales, customer service, media relations or recruiting. Socially empowered businesses are connecting with social savvy customers in a matrix of connections. The growth of social business means entire organizations are becoming empowered to communicate and advocate on behalf of the brand. What’s the ROI on that?
Value of Exchange – The relationship between consumers and the brands they buy from involves more than just a single transaction or a subscription. Every touchpoint between a company and a customer is an opportunity to advance or decline the relationship. Businesses have come a long way in doing that for specific departments such as marketing, PR, sales and customer service. But with the advent of social business and social media empowerment across the organization, the threads of dialog between employees and customers becomes diverse very quickly.
How to manage that? You don’t. Not entirely at least. You inspire it with leadership and a vision for what your brand stands for and what kind of relationship you want with customers, employees, partners, the media and public.
Maybe you’ve observed or worked with companies that have singularly emphasized ROI in every marketing tactic employed without seeing the bigger picture of investing in the broader brand and customer relationship. Viewing industry relationship building as speculative and with uncertain financial ROI can cost a business substantially in the form of positive brand connections with customers, influencers and media. There’s a sort of equity of relationship that serves as an outcome of meaningful industry participation and leadership that many companies don’t bother with because it doesn’t answer short term ROI questions.
When a competitor makes those investments, the neck and neck competition normally experienced can give way to the competitor pulling away because of the amplification effect on their marketing efforts that continued and consistent investments in network development, relationship building and goodwill have achieved – all without certain or short term ROI.
Is your company making marketing investments solely based on immediate ROI? Are you also making investments in resources and relationships as a thought leader and building your network beyond prospects, investors and industry journalists? How are you measuring the value of exchange between your employees and the public?
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Social Engagement ROI & the Value of Exchange | http://www.toprankblog.com
A to Z Internet Marketing News: Tacky Social PR, Can You Measure Up, Is Sales #1?, Sharing 2011, Email/Social Become One
Posted on 16. Dec, 2011 by Ashley Zeckman in Blog, Email Marketing, Search Industry News, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media measurement
2011 Social Sharing Trends [INFOGRAPHIC]
A new infographic recently released by Clearspring provides a good overview of social sharing in the past year. I especially liked the breakdown of shares by social media platform.
Facts You May Not Know You Didn’t Know:
- 73% of the top 10 shares were related to death & disaster
- Twitter makes up 52% of sharing in Japan
- Google sharing declines by 8% even with the addition of the +1 button
Is Google Scheming on Your Location?
“Google follows Currents launch with activity-recommendation tool Schemer and face recognition on Google+ Econsultancy” If you want to try out the new location based tool recently released by Google, get in line. Currently in beta testing mode “Schemer” is an online application that allows users to make plans and explore suggestions for things to do. In addition to launching new services Google+ is also putting it’s best face forward with a facial recognition feature. Sounds like Google’s been busy! But will it pay off in the end? Via Econsultancy.
To Post or Not to Post – Is That the Question?
“Should you Post Press Releases in Social Media?” We’ve all read them, and some of us may be guilty of writing them. Dull and sometimes self serving press releases hit the inbox of reporters and news wires on a daily basis. Some professionals have even begun using social media platforms to re-share the same information. However, is a social media channel the right place for sharing a news release? SPOLIER ALERT: The jury is still out. Via Forbes.
Bet Your Bottom Dollar We’re Investing in Social & Email
“Marketers to Integrate Social Media and Email in 2012” It is no surprise that companies are continuing to invest in social media and email marketing strategies. What you may find surprising is that over 68% of people surveyed are planning to integrate their social and email campaigns in 2012. Overall, marketing budgets for 2012 appear to be on the upswing with 51% planning to increase marketing budgets in the new year. Via MarketingProfs.
When it Comes to Measurement Take the Road Less Traveled
“The Social Media Measurement Imperative: Building Business Value” eMarketers recent interview with Irfan Kamal from Ogilby & Mather provides some good insight into measurement of online initiatives. Irfran says that “we are measuring just because we can measure, instead of measuring what we need to measure.” Moral of the story, the easiest data to collect may not be the data that truly has an impact on your bottom line. Via eMarketer.
Is Sales Getting the Boot?
“2012 B2B Marketing Predictions – Will Marketers Leave Sales Behind?” From the looks of 2012’s predictions it appears that marketers may be getting so caught up in digital marketing that sales are now taking a back seat. It may be too early to tell but I hope that companies plan to focus on the convergence of sales and marketing, not one or the other as a stand alone solution for increasing revenue. Via B2B Marketing Insider.
Were there any other newsworthy items you read this week and would like to share with our readers? Also, what are some of your marketing predictions for 2012? Enjoy your weekend! We’ll see you next week.
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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
A to Z Internet Marketing News: Tacky Social PR, Can You Measure Up, Is Sales #1?, Sharing 2011, Email/Social Become One | http://www.toprankblog.com
#MIMASummit: 6 Tips for Developing a Best Practices Approach to Social Media Measurement
Posted on 12. Oct, 2011 by AshleyZ in B2B, Blog, Competitive Intelligence, conference, content marketing, MIMA Summit, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, social media marketing, social media measurement
All marketers wish they knew how to better measure results, engage their audience, and measure ROI. Chuck Hemann opens up by warning that he won’t solve all of our problems but he will provide guidance on how to approach them.
Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance
There are 5 key steps that each marketer must take to create a successful social media campaign. What does this include?
- Listening to what is being said online
- Assessing the marketplace
- Engaging with current and prospective clients
- Measuring is a way for us to optimize
- Improving our strategy as we learn more
According to Hemann listening and measurement are the two most important ingredients for success. You cannot successfully execute on one without the other. Below are a few of the best practice approaches that Hemann shared with the audience at today’s session.
Understand What Simply Listening Can & Cannot Do
- Optimize your content in real time
- Create a better customer experience
- Quickly learn about potential product issues
- Marketing through conversation
- Gain valuable business intelligence
Create A Solid Social Media Strategy
- Planning and beginning and ending stages is essential
- Internal resources for facilitating and executing is critical
- You can’t listen to everything so fine tune your process
- Don’t rely on just one tool for quantifying results
Tools & Reporting: Questions Every Company Should Ask Themselves
- Has your internal team decided on the tools you want to use?
- Is there a training and implementation schedule in place?
- Has a process for reporting been scheduled?
- Do you know what your competition is doing?
Myths & Misconceptions To Avoid
- Social media cannot be measured: You collect dozens of data points each day that assist in measuring your social media efforts.
- ROI stands for something other than return on investment: ROI does not refer to influence or engagement it is directly related to gaining or saving the company money.
- Social media measurement is different than traditional media measurement: Social media is measured by utilizing a series of strategies and tactics just as you would with any other effort.
- Social media is meant to be organic and we already have too much data: You can never have too much data!
Never Forget the Five W’s
- What people are saying about your brand.
- Where they are talking about your brand.
- When people are talking about your brand.
- Who is talking about your brand.
- Why people are talking about your brand.
Common Measurement Questions You Should Always Keep In Mind
- How many people did we reach?
- Did the program create conversation?
- How do I get ad equivalency so the brand can compare this to our advertising?
- Were our fans/followers engaged?
What Is Our Take Away From This Afternoon’s Session?
- No subject is unapproachable
- This is a step-by-step process
- Gaining access to quality data provides a huge competitive advantage
[Note from Lee: Chuck has published his presentation online so take a look below for the full presentation. Thanks Chuck!]
There are many ways to effectively track social media metrics for B2B sales. What tools have you found to be effective for social media measurement?
Stay tuned for more posts from MIMA Summit 2011. Follow the hashtag #MIMASummit on Twitter and watch for any posts on @toprank or @azeckman to see updates and photos from the conference.
Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.
© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
#MIMASummit: 6 Tips for Developing a Best Practices Approach to Social Media Measurement | http://www.toprankblog.com
New Research Finds the Curation vs Creation Sweet Spot
Posted on 06. Sep, 2011 by Tristan Handy in Blog, content creation, content curation, Guest Posts, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media marketing, social media measurement
Whether you’re on a first date, meeting new people at a dinner party, or making it rain on Twitter, it’s just not a good idea to go on and on about yourself. It’s just awkward.
Conventional social media marketing wisdom suggests that brands should avoid being overly self-promotional. Thus, brands seek to “be a part of the conversation” by sharing links that are relevant to their followers but often not specifically about their products and services. This act of finding good content and sharing it is known as content curation.
Contrast this with another nugget of conventional social media marketing wisdom: that “content is king” – that the best thing that a social media marketer can do is create content that people find valuable enough to share with the world.
But…isn’t promoting your own content akin to talking about yourself? And isn’t that rude, and thus ineffective?
This creation-vs-curation paradox inspired me to look for some answers in the data.
Analyzing 150,000 Social Media Posts
The data behind this analysis comes from a sample of customers’ activity on Argyle Social, a social media marketing software provider. (Full disclosure: Argyle is a Convince & Convert sponsor and my employer. Also: we’re hiring!)
The selected sample included more than 150,000 tweets and status updates from more than 1,000 Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts between November 2010 and July 2011. Our customers are typically professional marketers representing a range of company sizes across most major industries.
Examining Typical Sharing Behavior
The graph below shows the sharing mix across all companies in our sample.
In short, 30% of the companies in our sample are curation-focused: 75% or more of their posts link to third-party websites. 13% of companies are creation-focused: most of their posts link to their own websites.
There are clearly a broad range of strategies employed, although companies tend towards strategies dominated by content curation, with 2/3 of companies linking to others more frequently than they link to themselves.
Which Works Best, Curation or Creation?
The real question, though, is what should companies be doing? What is the optimal content strategy, creating or curating? To measure that, let’s look at the impact of content strategy on click rates and conversion rates.
When looking at clicks, curation clearly dominates. Posts linking to third-party sites generate 33% more clicks than posts linking to owned sites. This makes sense — the very best content on the Internet is typically not going to live at yourcompany.com.
However, if you’re looking to drive conversions, content creation is the optimal strategy. Posts that link to your website have a 54% higher click-to-conversion rate than posts that link to third-party websites. This makes implicit sense, since conversions happen on your website. If you’re not driving people to your website and giving them good content to read when they get there, they’re not going to convert.
But the choice isn’t really between creation and curation — you should be doing both. The question is really what mix of those two strategies you should employ for maximum clicks and conversions?
Part of a Balanced Social Media Diet
To dig deeper into what mix of creation and curation works best, I’m going to revisit the behavior segments that I outlined above. What kind of results are companies in each of these segments seeing?
Curators = Companies that link to third-party sites 75% or more of the time.
Companies in this group focus very heavily on curation and rarely, if ever, link to their own content. Their results bear this out: they generate a lot of clicks, but very few conversions.
Balanced = Companies that link to third-party sites 50-75% of the time.
Companies in this group employ a balanced strategy of content creation and content curation. Their clicks per post are lower than Curators, but they generate significantly more conversions.
Self-Promoters = Companies that link to their own content 50% or more of the time.
Companies in this group link to their own content a majority of the time. This negatively impacts their clicks per post, and this reduction isn’t made up by an increased conversion rate.
It’s clear from the data that companies in the Balanced category achieve the best results overall. They generate 20% fewer clicks per post than Curators, but their conversion rate is 10X higher. I’ll take that trade any day.
The Creation and Curation Sweet Spot
We already determined that linking to your site 25-50% of the time generates the best results. But what if we look at the practices of the top five companies in generating clicks and conversions? What are they doing that has been so effective for them?
The top five companies in our sample that generate the most clicks link to their own sites 37.9% of the time. And the top five companies in our sample that generate the most conversions link to their own sites 41.6% of the time. This feels like a pretty solid sweet spot.
Lessons Learned and Takeaways
After digging into the numbers, the optimal balance for most companies is to link to your own content between 25-50% of the time, with 40% being the ideal mark.
But beware the law of averages! Just because these numbers are true of overall does not mean that they are the best numbers for you. Outliers exist.
My favorite example of an account that breaks the mold is one of our customers, TiqIQ. TiqIQ is in the business of publishing deals on sports tickets via social media. Almost every one of their posts links to a site where visitors can purchase tickets from them, so they almost never curate. However, their click and conversion rates are off the charts, because their audience is specifically following them to receive these deals.
If you’re new to social media marketing, a 40% content creation rate is a good place to start. But make sure you measure your own efforts and find out what works for your company.
About the Author
Tristan Handy is the Director of Operations for Argyle Social, a social media marketing dashboard that helps businesses create real returns from the social channel. Follow him on Twitter @jthandy.
Social Media Optimization 3 Steps to Tweeting with a Purpose
Posted on 18. Aug, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media measurement, social media optimization
Social media optimization gives you the ability to not waste bullets. Every tweet and status update has a cost associated with it. Perhaps not a direct financial cost, but a real, and at times considerable labor cost.
The time you spend tweeting and Facebooking and Google Plussing on behalf of yourself or your company is time you could be spending on some other form of communications or customer service. Alternatively, it’s time you could be spending watching Project Runway. Or hanging out with your kids. Or making fun of Lebron.
As Charlene Li said – and I routinely steal this line – “social media isn’t inexpensive, it’s different expensive.”
Smart companies are using social media optimization and social media marketing software to add some clarity to the value of their behavior on the social Web.
Getting smarter at social analytics requires three things:
1. A mindset shift on your part about social media optimization
You must embrace the concept that all tweets are not created equal, and there’s value in doing this stuff with additional rigor and analysis.
2. Killer social media marketing software
You need the data ecosystem necessary to make relevant, judicious decisions about your social media behaviors.
I’ve been playing with Argyle Social for a few weeks (they are a Convince & Convert sponsor, so they gave me a free account), and I am hooked. The data they offer is extraordinary, and perhaps more importantly it’s easy to understand and access.
The guys at Argyle come from an email marketing background (like me) so they were raised on a diet of analytics, testing, and identification and isolation of meaningful variables. They are smart, data nerds first, and social media marketing software developers second. And the product is better as a result.
3. A commitment to actually doing something with social analytics data
Just because everything is trackable doesn’t mean you should track everything. The core challenge with social media optimization isn’t availability of data (with the possible exception of Twitter impressions data, as I ranted about here in my social media measurement post).
Instead, the challenge is knowing what the data MEANS, and what to DO about it.
Too many companies in social media tend to misapply breadth and specificity. This results in hand-wringing about the success of a specific tweet, when looking at your social behaviors over a much longer period is far more illustrative. It also results in companies evaluating the success of a particular channel (Twitter and Facebook, in particular), based on aggregate fans or followers, which has almost zero analytical or prescriptive value.
What is useful about good social media marketing software – and Argyle Social in particular – is that it is inherently set up to allow you to understand how your social efforts are trending and progressing by looking at them from a batched perspective.
Social Media Optimization Table
Here’s an example from their new, free white paper on how to set up social media statistics (check it out, it’s great). In this hypothetical case, a real estate developer builds multiple campaigns to create silted social analytics for his posts about trends, financing, news, and owning a home.
With this type of structure – and goals or conversion events plugged in – you can see important value patterns emerge over time that will help you use your social media marketing resources (most notably, time) more efficiently.
There’s several components of Argyle Social that work well for me.
- The ability to easily curate content using the browser bookmarklet. I can find an interesting blog post, and send it out in about 3 seconds. Argyle automatically attaches rich tracking codes.
- The unified inbox that shows me Twitter @replies, retweets, and DMs plus Facebook comments in one place. This of course is not rare functionality, as several social optimization packages have it, but Argyle Social’s version is as good as any.
- Scheduling of posts in advance is a breeze, even if you have multiple people working together as a team.
- I can create custom tracking URLs in a few seconds, even if they won’t be used in social media, and setting up conversion goals is equally simple (provided you can drop a small piece of code on your website).
Social Analytics Dashboard
Social Analytics Report for Me
But the social analytics dashboard is really the star of the show.
From there, I can at a glance see how I’m trending on clicks, goals, interactions, and subscriberson a week-to-week, month-to-month, or custom date range basis. Then I can drill down to look at specific campaigns, or even individual tweets.
Tweet-by-Tweet Social Analytics
Smartly, Argyle automatically combines the results of tweets and status updates that contain the same link. This is very handy for people that tweet new blog posts more than once (like me).
Knowing which campaigns to set up and what to call them is sometimes a bridge too far at the onset of a social analytics campaign. Argyle Social lets you assign particular tweets to a campaign after the fact, which is very useful for down-the-road analysis.
Free social analytics white paper
I’m getting better at social media optimization thanks to Argyle Social. My pal Jason Falls is a big believer too. Take a look at the white paper, and/or check out a free trial. Prices range from $149 to $499/month – there’s also an excellent white label version for agencies.
It’s definitely more expensive (in most configurations) than social media marketing software like HootSuite, but I think it’s worth the investment. If you want to embrace social media optimization – and eventually serious companies will have to – I think you’ll agree that it’s worth the step up.
5 Reasons Social Media Measurement is Making You Lie to Yourself
Posted on 07. Aug, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, edison research, mack collier, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media marketing, social media measurement, social media metrics, tom webster, top 10
Social media measurement causes unsavory (and ineffective) marketing behavior because unlike the rest of our marketing key performance indicators, social media metrics are out there for anyone to see.
Was it a surprise last week when Presidential wannabe Newt Gingrich was (allegedly) busted for having 1.3 million followers on Twitter, most of which were bots and fake accounts? Not really. It may have raised an eyebrow that someone applying for the most important job in the world would (allegedly) stoop to fakery to boost follower counts. But despite some initial reluctance, politics has embraced the social media Egosystem as much or more than any other industry.
(Nice analysis on it from Ian Lurie over at Conversation Marketing)
Being a former political consultant myself, this kerfuffle got me pondering about social media measurement and the bigger lessons of key performance indicators. I see five.
1. Visibility of Social Media Metrics Drives Behavior
How much do you think we’d be talking about twitter followers or Facebook likes if how many you have wasn’t attached to your public profile like a goiter?
If on every website you visited you saw a number in the corner that showed how many email newsletter subscribers they had, we’d be putting a lot more emphasis into our email programs. We care about twitter followers and Facebook likes disproportionately not because of the power of the medium, but because we keep score in public.
There was a time when there was a lot of news coverage of comparative website “hits” but largely that kind of “story” went away with the fortunate exit of hit counters pinned to the footer of your site. Everyone knows that data from Nielsen, Compete, Quantcast, Alexa and their ilk is only semi-accurate unless the site chooses to report actual numbers, so we’ve mostly accepted the fact that website traffic is a dull topic not worth our curiosity or bile.
2. Our Belief That Bigger is Better Makes It So
Every legitimate social media consultant in America will tell you that it’s not about how many twitter followers or Facebook likes you have, it’s what you do with them. (and good job by Kellye Crane and Mack Collier on that in the CNBC.com coverage of Newt-gate)
In terms of driving measurable behavior, conversions, revenue, loyalty and advocacy, etc. they are of course correct. Number of twitter followers doesn’t mean a thing, right? Wrong.
The reality is that social media measurement is a very public dick measuring competition, and we buy it hook, line, and sinker. Why would Newt not only (allegedly) pay to build a following that dwarfs the other candidates, but then have the audacity/stupidity to brag about the advantage?
Because it matters in the court of public perception. Twitter is used monthly by just 8% of Americans 12 or older, according to Tom Webster and Edison Research, yet the penetration rate amongst “thought leaders” “celebs” and “media” is damn near 100%, and that drives its role as an arbiter of popularity and fame.
We may not like it. We may not even choose to admit it. But it’s disingenuous to suggest that number of twitter followers has no impact on how you or your organization are viewed by the vox populi. It’s not a key performance indicator, it’s a key popularity indicator.
3. You’re Not Much Better Than Newt Yourself
Yes our fascination with the public nature of social media measurement causes some issues. But the bigger problem is that the whole system is a house of cards.
Guess what? While most of your Twitter followers are probably real people they probably don’t see your tweets, much less respond to them. It’s stunning how many marketers – even in major companies and agencies – don’t understand (or choose to ignore) the massive difference between twitter followers and actual twitter reach.
If you have 10,000 followers, do 10,000 people see your tweet? Absolutely not. Many of those people do not use Twitter any longer (abandonment rates have been reported to be as high as 50%), may not be logging on to Twitter today, may not be logging on at a time where your tweet shows up in their timeline, or may use Twitter as a “social telephone” paying attention primarily to @replies.
The reality is that we do not know how many impressions each Tweet generates. We can determine engagement rate via clicks and retweets (I use Convince & Convert sponsor Argyle Social for social communication because of their incredible metrics). But, we cannot determine impressions, because Twitter will not show them to us. Hmmm, I wonder why?
Think about it from an email perspective. Twitter followers is the number of subscribers you have. Twitter reach (impressions) is your open rate, and that’s not available.
A bunch of Newt’s followers are (allegedly) robots. But the net effect of a robot and an actual person that didn’t see your tweets is exactly the same.
4. Facebook Likes Is Just As Bogus
To their credit, Facebook at least shows us actual impressions in their Insights social media measurement console.
But the reality is that in our zeal to accumulate as many “likes” as possible for our fan page (largely comprised of people that already like us, so we’re putting forth extreme effort to preach to the converted), we mostly neglect to notice that a very small percentage of those fans see our carefully crafted status updates.
A report from Pagelever (fresh out of beta, and the best Facebook analytics package available, by far) studying 400 million fans found that just 7.49% of fans (on average) see the status updates from any particular brand. This is because of Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm that sanitizes your news feed based on you and your friends’ propensity to interact with status updates from each brand and person to whom you’re connected on the platform.
Using our email analogy then, we can say that on average (your results may vary), the “open rate” for Facebook is 7.49%, and the “click-through rate” (the interaction rate shown in Insights) mostly ranges from .25% to .9%. Much, much lower than even a middling email campaign.
I’m thinking you’d see a lot less crowing about your 50,000 Facebook likes if you had to report and talk about it using unsexy but true numbers: “3,750 active Facebook likes.”
5. Play Your Own Game
Despite the gold rush, social media is still a nascent industry. One symptom of immature markets is an overwhelming fear of doing it wrong. Nobody wants to lose their job as CMO of a major company because of some newfangled medium that didn’t exist five minutes ago.
This creates a culture of comparison, whereby instead of spending the requisite time and effort crafting a bespoke social media strategy that uniquely fits our company and its culture, we instead yearn to do it just like the other guys.
Share of voice. Comparisons of twitter followers, Facebook likes, and YouTube subscribers. An over reliance on case studies. Even social media competitor audits (and I do many of them). All of these are byproducts of our collective fear about playing our own game.
Should you learn from your competitors and other companies “doing it right” in social media? Sure, but don’t lie to yourself. Realize that the numbers we proudly toss around like silk sashes are often fictitious hair shirts. Proceed accordingly. And with caution.
The 6 Step Process for Measuring Social Media
Posted on 31. May, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media KPIs, social media measurement, social media ROI, social media success metrics, Social Media Success Summit
Can social media be measured? If course it can. But it’s not always easy. For a full and very specific account of how to measure social media in your company, pick up a copy of The Now Revolution, or Social Media ROI (by Olivier Blanchard).
However, here are the basics to consider, drawn from my presentation “How to Hug Your Calculator” last week at Social Media Success Summit 2011.
Step 1. Understand How Social Fits in Your Company
What makes measuring social tricky is that HOW your company uses social media changes the metrics that makes sense for you.
Remember, the goal is not to be good at social media, but to be good at business because of social media. Thus, you first have to understand your business level objectives, and how social media can support them.
Step 2. Know What You Can Measure
Not every company has access to the same metrics. If you’re an e-commerce company, you can measure different elements of your social program than you can if you’re not an e-commerce company. Understand what is possible, and then remove metrics that aren’t relevant.
Step 3. Decide on ROI vs. Correlation
There’s only one way to calculate ROI (return on investment). It’s sales minus expenses, divided by expenses, expressed as a percentage. There is no other formula. But sometimes, getting at true ROI is difficult, especially on the “return” side.
In those instances, you might opt to instead examine how social media success ties to business success over the long haul, and make correlation studies about that relationship. What you want to see is a situation where business success increased in lock step with social success (or slightly trailing social success). You can’t prove that social caused that success, but it sure looks fishy.
True ROI is a better equation, but sometimes is too difficult to get at – and not just for social media, but for TV, radio, print, event sponsorships, outdoor, and your customer service department.
Step 4. Select Metrics
Once you’ve gone through the first 3 steps, you can pick actual metrics that make sense for your company. Pick them BEFORE you get heavily involved in social media, to reduce the temptation to pick metrics that support your position down the road.
I’m a big proponent (as we discuss in The NOW Revolution) of picking approximately 3 metrics, and seeing how they “fit” for your company. Sometimes measuring too many things is worse than measuring too few.
Step 5. Share the Data Widely
If you want your whole company supporting your social initiatives, it will help if the whole company (more or less) has access to the scoreboard. Don’t treat social media results like the nuclear codes. Sharing your results will inspire the internal discussions and ideas necessary to take your program to the next level.
Step 6. Embrace Anecdotes
It’s not mathematically defensible in the way ROI is, but you should try to include anecdotes in your social media metrics. Ask your operations, customer service, and community management teams to document circumstances where you turned lemons into lemonade, delighted a customer, or just did something awesome in social media. Sometimes those unique case studies create more internal support than a whole stack of spreadsheets.
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