Determining a Social Media Platform

Whether a business sells direct to consumer (B2C) or to business (B2B), it should examine social media platforms as a marketing venue.

There are numerous social media platforms available to a company: Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, and so on. The challenge facing a company is what social media platform should it utilize: one, some, or all? Then, what should be the level of activity? Also, adding social media to a company’s marketing mix is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Each platform fits a different need. A company should examine the platforms to assess what works best.

To determine the platforms or platform a company should use, there are a number of things it should consider. A company should be where its target audience is. What does the social platform do to help reach a company’s overall business and marketing goals? Additionally, a company’s content and search-engine optimization (SEO) strategies and tactics factor into what social media platforms it chooses. Also, a company should align the social media platforms with how it presents its brand.

To get a better handle on which social media platforms to use, a company should examine the demographics of the platforms. For example, Pinterest is a good option for a company seeking to target women, as 82% of Pinterest users are women. If a company is looking to target college graduates and higher-income individuals, LinkedIn is the best option—57% of users had a college degree or higher, and 50% make over $50,000 a year and 21% make over a $100,000 a year. For targeting men, Google+ is a good option; 71% of the users are men. Google+ is especially good for targeting “techie” men (Skelton, 2012). Examining the demographics will help a company figure out which platforms would be best.

The content vs. conversation argument really depends on a company’s target market, what elements of mixed marketing it will use, and how it is focusing its resources. If there is a heavy SEO component, the company will need to be mindful of Google’s Hummingbird, Panda, and Penguin algorithms. Hummingbird is a reset of the entire Google search algorithm; it incorporates Panda and Penguin. Hummingbird makes searches more contextual—instead of just focusing on keywords, it looks at the context of the question asked in the search query (Elran, 2013). Panda looks for rich and deep content (Manzo, 2012). For the social aspect, Penguin looks at how sharable the content is (DiSilvestro, 2013).

So, even if strong SEO is part of the company’s plan, good content is still a major factor. It helps even more when that content is sharable. To assist in driving the sharing of content, the company needs to engage/converse with its constituency.

Another factor in deciding which social media platforms to use is the determination of how a company will utilize and participate in the platforms. Each platform offers different ways to reach a company’s audience and interact with them.

Facebook has it all. Through Facebook, a company can directly interact with consumers and carry ongoing conversations with them. A company can post videos, pictures, and other images. A company can also conduct polls or surveys. Additionally, a company can place ads and sponsored content on Facebook. Like LinkedIn, Facebook can be used as a recruitment tool. Facebook probably offers the greatest variety of marketing activities a company can do. If a company has the right resources and its target audience is available, Facebook is a sensible platform option (Henshell, 2012).

Google+ is very similar to Facebook. However, Google+ has a much smaller overall base of users. Google+ does offer a video group chat service that no other social media platform offers. There could be creative ways for a company to leverage that. As mentioned earlier, Google+ offers some different demographic groups; to reach these groups, Google+ could be a good option (The Wishpond Blog, 2014).

LinkedIn is a business networking site. It enables friends, colleagues, and associates to stay connected on a business level. It’s the online version of the old-school rolodex, but much more useful and interactive. With LinkedIn, a company can have a business profile where is can post a variety of information and content. On its profile, the company can post videos, links, written content, images, and other information. A company can also advertise or post sponsored content. Additionally, LinkedIn can serve multiple business and marketing levels. It can be a recruitment tool and a source to mine for sales leads, engage with target audiences, and increase a company’s industry and brand awareness. It is probably a better platform for a B2B company than for a B2C company. (Levy, 2013).

Pinterest focuses almost exclusively on visual content. A company can post and share pictures, videos, and other images with light commenting. Also, a company can let followers can post images or videos on a company’s Pinterest board. At the moment, Pinterest offers no advertising or sponsored services. Pinterest is ideal for a company that has a lot of visuals it can use to promote its business. Wedding-, fashion-, and crafting-related companies have fared well on Pinterest (Levy, 2013).

Twitter consists of short bursts of information in a newsfeed fashion. A company’s messages are limited to 140 characters per post—these posts can include hyperlinks or images. Twitter also allows companies to post six-second videos with its Vine service. Currently, there is no advertising or sponsored services offered by Twitter. Twitter is a real-time, fast-paced environment. Users typically expect almost instant responses. This is difficult for a company to manage and maintain without the proper resources (Henshell, 2012).

YouTube is a video platform. A company can post videos and create its own brand channel. A company can engage with people via the comment section. YouTube is an excellent venue for branding videos. Also, it is a great option for a company that needs to post how-to or instructional videos (Henshell, 2012).

If I were a marketing advisor using this process for the semiconductor company Quintic, I would recommend Quintic only use one social media platform: LinkedIn. LinkedIn offers the best platform to reach Quintic’s target audience, as Quintic is a B2B company. Quintic can post content on its LinkedIn page to help establish itself as a thought leader in the industry. The content posting can also help the company SEO. Additionally, LinkedIn would provide Quintic the versatility to accomplish multiple business and marketing goals: building brand awareness, driving recruitment, and generating sales leads.

References

DiSilvestro, A. (Jun. 9, 2013). Google Penguin 2.0: Now What for SEO?. Social Media Today. Retrieved from http://socialmediatoday.com/amanda-disilvestro/1521081/google-penguin-20-seo-now-what

Elran, A. (Nov. 2013). Should You Change Your SEO Strategy Because of Google Hummingbird?. Kiss Metrics – Blog. Retrieved from http://blog.kissmetrics.com/google-hummingbird/

Henshell, R. (Sep. 20, 2012). Which Social Media Platform is Right For Your Business?. Social Media Today. Retrieved from http://socialmediatoday.com/james-debono/827961/which-social-media-platform-right-your-business

Levy, S. (Dec. 2, 2013). How to Choose the Best Social Media Platform for Your Business. Entrepreneur. Retrieved from http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/230020#ixzz2rNpc7DED

Manzo, M. (Jan. 10, 2012). The Evolution of SEO with Google Panda. Social Media Today. Retrieved from http://socialmediatoday.com/marymanzo/425703/evolution-seo-google-panda

Skelton, A. ( Mar. 9, 2012). Social Demographics: Who's Using Today's Biggest Networks. Mashable. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2012/03/09/social-media-demographics/

The Wishpond Blog (Jan. 8, 2014) Social Media Marketing: Which Platform Is Right For Your Business. Business 2 Community. Retrieved from http://www.business2community.com/social-media/social-media-marketing-platform-right-business-0735411#gdfxgWM85EOkg6xl.99

Where Do a Website's Visitors Come From?

Foundational metrics can give companies some good initial data points to better understand the website traffic and the website’s performance. Visit characterization is another category of web analytics metrics; this enables companies to dig a little deeper into a website’s performance, traffic, and visitors. Visit characterization includes metrics such as entry and exit page, visit duration referrer, and click-through.

Visit characterization metrics offer companies another level of information; of the various metrics, the referrer metric offer some interesting data. The metric “referrer” tells a company the previous webpage a visitor was on. Referrer can be drilled down into many sub-segments, such as internal referrer and external referrer. The internal referrer indicates referral webpages only within a company’s website. The external referrer is the page a visitor was on prior to visiting a company’s website. There can be instances where the web analytics registers a visitor as “no referrer” or “direct navigation.” This typically means the visitor manually typed in the URL (Burby & Brown, 2007).

The external referrer provides some noteworthy information. It tells a company where visitors were before coming to its site and gives the company an idea of what drove the visitors to its site. This can be valuable information when assessing return on investment (ROI) and measuring the results of a company’s various online marketing activities, maybe some offline ones too (Gunelius, n.d.).

Some specific online marketing (and PR) activities the external referrer can track include search engines, news articles, and banner ads.

Utilizing the external referrer, a company can drill down into how its search engine marketing activities are working. First, the external referrer tells a company which search engine drives the most traffic to the company’s website—Bing, Google, Yahoo, etc.—as well as what search terms, words, and phrase visitors used to reach the company’s website. From this, a company can determine what’s working, what’s not working, and what it can adjust. The company can refocus activities such as search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, its paid search, and so on (Deep Software, n.d.).

The external referrer can also provide a company with a tool to partially measure the impact of its PR activities. The external referrer will tell a company what news and media websites are driving traffic, if the company is appearing in Google news searches, and if the company’s news is being shared on social media channels. – then driving traffic to its website (Sullivan, 2010). The external referrer doesn’t paint the full picture of the results (success or failure) of PR activities, but it provides useful information. The company will have a better idea of what online news and media outlets to target.

Additionally, a company can track the performance of its banner ads. It will know what types of banners are working and on which websites the banner ads drive the most traffic. This will clearly provide a company with ROI on its banner ad activities. Advertising legend John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” (Sullivan, 2010). At least with banner ads, a company will have some info.

A further reason the external referrer is a powerful metric is that with it, a company knows the last business a visitor came from. This is prized marketing data. Now, when that visitor reaches a company’s website, the company can tailor messaging towards that visitor (Sullivan, 2010).

References

Burby, J. & Brown, A. (Aug. 16, 2007). Web Analytics Definitions. Web Analytics Association. Retrieved from http://www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/Files/PDF_standards/WebAnalyticsDefinitionsVol1.pdf

Deep Software. (n.d.). Web Site Visitor Behavior Metrics. Retrieved from http://www.deep-software.com/web-site-visitor-behavior-metrics.asp

Gunelius, S. (n.d.). 10 Blog Metrics Bloggers Should Track Through Web Analytics Tools. About.com. Retrieved from http://weblogs.about.com/od/addonsandplugins/tp/10-Blog-Metrics-Bloggers-Should-Track-Through-Web-Analytics-Tools.htm

Sullivan, D. (May 25, 2010). The Death Of Web Analytics? An Ode To The Threatened Referrer. Search Engine Land. Retrieve from http://searchengineland.com/the-death-of-web-analytics-an-ode-to-the-referrer-42875

Visits Are Fundamental

There are some basic building blocks in web analytics and measuring web traffic to a website. This category is referred to as “foundational.” Some foundational areas of measurement include page views, visits, and unique visitors.

Using web analytics, a company can glean interesting information from visits or it’s also referred to as sessions. What is a visit, and how is it defined? A visit is defined as the duration of an individual’s (visitor/unique visitor) time and path of page views while on a particular website from the time the visitor enters that website until the time they exit. A visit can be just a single page view, 10 page views, 100 page views, and so on (Burby & Brown, 2007).

Most web analytics tools will automatically terminate a visit after 30 minutes of inactivity (Martin, 2009). Also, each time the same person visits a website, each visit is counted separately. So, if an individual goes to a website 10 different times in a month, it’s counted as 10 visits (Lurie, 2004).

At the basic level, visits can paint a picture of what visitors do on a company’s website. Visits denote users’ paths and how many pages they view.

                    Image of what a sample visit could look like. (Google, 2014)

From this, a company can start to track patterns in sessions. Examining a news site and an e-commerce site can offer some real-world and online-world examples of how visits can be useful.

For a news site, visits can reveal how many stories visitors read, what content they seek, and what sort of ads they click on. Also, visits disclose where visitors click-out/leave, are some stories too long, etc.

For an e-commerce site, visits show consumers’ paths to purchases. They can show if the consumer spends a lot of time on the site browsing. They chart consumers’ paths, such as whether they start at the home page and navigate through, or if they start at a specific product page. Visits also show the path length of a consumer starting at the home page to purchase versus the path length of a consumer starting at a product page to purchase.

Also, visits will reveal if consumers are leaving prior to or at purchase/checkout.

With the data from visits, a company can start to build information on its customers’ behaviors as well as any web design issue. Additionally, if consumers are leaving prior to checkout, there may be a payment accepted issue (not enough payment options for consumers) or problems with the checkout process.

Visits are a valuable tool—a lot of information is gleaned about how visitors use the site and how easy or difficult the site is to navigate. However, visits aren’t the only web analytic metric available to companies and digital marketers. When a company starts tying together metrics like repeat visitors and unique visitors with visits, the collected information becomes even more useful and telling. For example, with an e-commerce website, a sale may not happen on the first visit. By looking at visits and repeat visitors, the company can tell more about consumers’ shopping habits. Do they gather a lot of information prior to a purchase? Are they repeat purchasers and potentially loyal customers? By looking at visits and unique visitors, the company can tell if consumers made their decisions either prior to visiting the website or while on the website (Dainow, 2006).

References

Burby, J. & Brown, A. (Aug. 16, 2007). Web Analytics Definitions. Web Analytics Association. Retrieved from http://www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/Files/PDF_standards/WebAnalyticsDefinitionsVol1.pdf

Dainow, B. (Jan. 19, 2006). Visit vs. Session. iMedia Connect. Retrieved from http://www.imediaconnection.com/article_login.aspx?id=7862

Google. (2014). How Visits are calculated in Analytics. Retrieved from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2731565?hl=en

Martin, T.F. (Jun. 12, 2009). Pageviews vs. Visits vs. Visitors. Web Product Blog. Retrieved from http://www.webproductblog.com/web-analytics/pageviews-vs-visits-vs-visitors/

Lurie, I. (Mar. 20, 2004). Hits, Sessions and Visits: Reading A Traffic Report Accurately. Portent. Retrieved from http://www.portent.com/blog/analytics/hits_sessions_and_visits_readi.htm

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This blog looks at web metrics, analytics and SEO. This information helps companies understand what drives traffic to its website, how well the website performs and the results of a company’s efforts online.