I had a telephone conversation with a fellow professional this morning about their new website (which I won’t share with you here for reasons which will become apparent).
The person concerned has invested in an attractive new site which has some very useful features, is approachable and demonstrates their experience well. The firm have also set up a facebook page and a twitter account which is engaging and shares useful information.
‘Is it working?’ I asked. ‘Well I think so,’ she replied.
‘Do you have google analytics on the site?’ I asked. No. No analytics at all to speak of. It has been a rush and the web guy is busy all the time.
The problem with this is that this person doesn’t know if her social media activities are working, and she won’t until she makes her website perform the job it should be doing. That job is to generate more business for her.
So I thought I would post here 5 steps to make sure you have your website working for you as part of your social media strategy.
1. Be in the right places
Make sure you are in the online places that your customers and advocates use. Just as with choosing the right places to network, you don’t want to waste time in the wrong breakfast meeting. Do some research and make sure you can find out where they are, and make sure you’re there too. For professional people, Linkedin is an obvious place, but Twitter also has a growing user base in construction, for example. Go and have a look for your customers. Where do they hang out?
2. Be googlable for your terms as well as your name
The obvious online place everyone uses is Google. Make sure that people who do search for you can find you via google. You’d be surprised how many people can’t quite remember the name of that architect but they know they have an office in Ipswich. And ensure that your website is optimised so that people searching find you, when you are the answer to their question.
3. Be useful on your site as well as when tweeting
Make sure that you use twitter, forums, linkedin, facebook etc to link back to useful content on your website. This means that you need to provide useful content on your website. A blog is a very good, low cost way of doing this without incurring significant ongoing charges from webdesigners. Set up a pdf download plugin and image handling tools and you can do it all yourself. Next time someone asks you a question, you can blog about it too. This will attract more people to your website where they will look around.
4. Encourage measurable actions
Even if you have your own business, you must justify the use of your time using social tools, so make sure you measure the results. When I joined twitter the traffic to our company website increased dramatically, including search clickthroughs by 79%. If you have items that can be downloaded, track them. If you can create a newsletter or blog monitor the signups – these are people who want to hear more from you. Find ways to measure the intangibles like people calling direct from your website. Create actions which can be measured, to show you how your strategy is working, or not.
5. Measure and Test
Choose a range of actions to monitor and begin to measure them. Install google analytics on your website and blog (it is free) and learn how to use it. Create goals for the pdf downloads and for completions of your ‘request a ringback’ form. Then, try out different types of activity and see what works. Be ruthless with your time and measure the results. Then if things don’t work, you can analyse why and remove the glitches. And if things do work, you can do them again and more of the same!
There are my five steps to make sure you have the your website working properly as part of your social media strategy. Did I miss something out? Please do share it below.
Don’t know how to do these things? Why not ask me to help you?
Hi Su,
Another great blog…..thanks
Just wanted to add something about websites (point 3). To get the most from social media, people should have the ability to regulary add new content to their site which can be in the form of blogs, articles, news, events etc.
Also they should have links to the various social media platforms they use, sharing buttons to spread the word and RSS feeds so people can keep up to date with new content the moment it is published.
Just a few thoughts….
Thanks for adding that James, much appreciated.
Hi Su
Great points listed above. It’s very important to have objectives for your website so that you can measure against them as you say above and something I have always advocated in my blogs. At the end of the day, with all your marketing efforts, you are driving additional traffic to your website with social media.
If your current website is not already generating you quality leads then why add more traffic to the top of the funnel? Use Google Analytics and other click analysis tools to work out why visitors are leaving your website from particular pages and fix those pages first. Don’t invest time, resources and money to attract traffic to broken pages or websites. Look at what pages visitors are landing on for particular search terms and see if the search term matches the content on that page. Is it relevant?
Long time ago I wrote about 5 metrics B2B companies should be using at the heart of their measurement process with one being Loyalty. As a B2B company, what content will make people keep coming back to your site? How often do you want them to keep coming back? The 5 metrics are Loyalty, Recency, Depth, Length and Goals. http://digimarketingconvo.blogspot.com/2009/12/b2b-websites-and-measuring-success.html.
Increasing engagement on your website is key for social media activities, think about the content on your website and ask yourself “Why would anyone want to share this information with their network?”. I’ve seen many web pages which have a ‘share this’ facility embedded and yet the the site/pages contain poor information or badly designed pages.
From a search point of view, its important to identify terms with low competition and lots of activity. No point optimising your site for a term which gets less than 10 searches per month. Investigate where lots of searches are being performed, and go acquire that search traffic.
Anyway, great post. Look forward to more on this discussion.
Pritesh
Thanks Pritesh,
That’s a very good post, I thought I’d bookmark it with Delicious, only to find I already had…
Some very useful advice there, especially on the right things to measure and being consistent.