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Practical advice for companies interested in social media
Surefire Digital was founded by Rob Jones to provide trustworthy, unbiased advice for companies who wish to improve the performance of their websites. Specialising in the strategic planning of digital marketing campaigns, Rob connects businesses with specialists that he trusts and have proven to be reliable. We are delighted to partner with Surefire Digital in the provision of specialist SEO services.
In part three of our interview, Rob gives excellent advice to companies that are interested in using social media.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): How can a company use social media to maximise conversions and sales – not just generate high volumes of traffic that may be poorly qualified?
Rob Jones (Surefire Digital): Social media is just another touch point; it offers slightly different ways of communicating and connecting with users. If you want to catch user details, such as names and email addresses, you need to offer something of value to encourage users to part with their details. Don’t try to get too much on the first capture; provide an incentive, give a little and then build continual give and take. The key to maximising sales using this method is constantly qualifying people at every step of the funnel.
Platforms other than your website can be used too. For example, one company I know offered the first three chapters of their book to the first 100 people who sent them a direct message in Twitter (private message). The chapters were shared around, and people talked about it, illustrating the immediacy of social media and its viral capabilities /nature
Another thing for companies to bear in mind when using social media is the question of timing and localisation. Different time zones are a factor, especially with something like Twitter, as you need to push a message out when the right people are awake. Don’t forget the basics!
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): It can be quite a chore keeping a company’s social media presence fresh. Do you know of any way to minimise the pain, and syndicate content efficiently across the web?
Rob Jones (Surefire Digital): Yes, it can be big drain on resources to keep social media up to date, especially as it’s very much a responsive medium. It’s not easy to keep a business presence fresh; lots of larger companies dedicate resources to keeping it up to date. But for SMEs that’s not affordable and outsourcing is difficult, It’s compounded by the need to find people who know your sector, and I don’t think there is an easy way to do that yet.
There are things that businesses can do to be more efficient however. Syndicating content well is a good example. Twitter has Facebook and LinkedIn applications so when you tweet it’s displayed on your profile in those platforms too. All you have to do is add the #fb hashtag for Facebook, or #in for LinkedIn, and this enables you to be selective about which content you want to syndicate across. Then you have a presence on several platforms updated at the same time..
Businesses can also put their Twitter feed onto WordPress blogs, keeping the content fresh there too. Twitter really is at the forefront of rapid syndication.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): What advice do you have for companies regarding their use of social media?
Rob Jones (Surefire Digital): Passion breeds followers; it creates connection through shared emotion and shared interest. In short, if you’re passionate it will work.
If a company is looking to build reputation it has to be aware that transparency is key in this day and age. Social media is very transparent so by definition it’s also wide open and everything you do is visible. In social media, people can see through non-transparent companies, and can turn off to that company’s message.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): What are the key stats that customers should be paying attention to if they are serious about digital marketing, and how often should they check their website’s performance?
Rob Jones (Surefire Digital): I advocate checking website analytics on a weekly basis. In terms of key stats, there’s a common misperception that I’d like to clear up: hits don’t equate to visitors, instead you should look at unique visitor stats, anything else skews the results.
The next important thing to do is set up a funnel to track where people are coming in leaving, bounce rate, key pages on the site etc, measure the activity there. A business needs to measure the activity in the funnel and keep track of the visitors to see if any pages are making people drop out. Another useful insight is monitoring the pages that people are landing on the most and looking at how well those pages are converting.
Something I’d like to add is that all business owners should ensure that the Google analytics (or whatever is being used) is set up in their name, not their agency’s name, in case the relationship breaks down later on. The same goes for domain names too.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): If conversions and sales are the things that really interest customers, how do you help them track these – and can all online leads be traced back to the enquiry source?
Rob Jones (Surefire Digital): Certain types of conversions are very easy to track as you’re effectively looking for evidence that a “nobody” has turned into a “somebody”. In other words, an unidentifiable visitor has turned into someone you can name. This is obvious when a desired conversion is somebody signing up to a newsletter; they become a “somebody” when you get their email address. This kind of conversion can also be tied into Google analytics, as you can examine the traffic and user behaviour with the “thank you” page that loads after they submit their email address.
When a business uses a website to drive offline sales, it usually goes through an email route initially, but can also involve other kinds of follow ups and processes. If these are well designed, it is possible to track someone from the website as you can see where they signed up, look at how you’ve kept in touch and then see the point when that person buys a product or service. If a business receives a phone call that leads to a sale, it’s up to the business owner to train their staff (or simply remember themselves) to always ask the caller where they found the business number.
Certain code scripts can be used on websites to track an individual user through the site, or through the sales process, so you can see at what point they abandon a shopping cart for example. Scripts can also actively track the length of time that someone is viewing a page. Some companies use these to display a message if the user has been viewing something for a certain amount of time, say 45 seconds or so. This has to be done carefully and be well tailored to the audience. I have seen good results with this though, and sometimes just putting up a real person’s picture with an invitation to call for more information can help the conversion rate.