Optimizing Engagement through Multiple Social Media Platforms

Social media is used by brands to drive engagement and interaction. The objective of any social media strategy is to provide the right tools so that people can engage with a brand, people, products, or service onsite and offsite. There are many social media channels available to marketers and in order to optimize engagement, brands should integrate multiple social media channels. Each channel is unique and provides a different level of engagement to help customers create lasting relationships with a brand. For example, Google AdWords is a tool that allows brands to create sponsored links in Google search results. These links are ads that an advertiser created and Google displays based on the relevance of a search. Another platform that is completely different is Twitter. This channel is a social networking and microblogging service that enables users to send and read “tweets”, which are messages limited to 140 characters. Each of these platforms is different and both can be used to optimize interaction between brands and consumers (Wells, 2014).

A key benefit of social media is that content across multiple platforms can be integrated. For example Facebook pages can be optimized to include widgets that display postings on other social media accounts. Pins on Pinterest can be posted on Facebook pages as well as YouTube videos to optimize interactions with consumers. Integrating platforms allows brands to increase touchpoints with consumers which leaves a lasting impression and helps create long-term relationships.

Choosing which platforms to integrate is no easy task. Each platform is unique and serves a different purpose for a brand. The best way to identify which platforms to use is to determine the target market and then determine social media objectives. Once these two tasks are completed, it will be easier to identify where and how to reach customers. New social networking sites and applications are appearing on the market constantly and brands cannot take them all on. Every site does not serve the same crowd just like every business does not serve the same purpose. For example, 82% of Pinterest users are women and 71% of Google+ users are men. Brands like Martha Stewart have identified Pinterest as the best social media platform to reach their target market and their Pinterest page drives more traffic to the brand’s website than Facebook and Twitter combined. Knowing your audience and where they interact on social media is essential to optimizing engagement (“Battle of the sexes,” 2012). 

There are a few social media platforms that are popular among brands. The first is Facebook which is the holy grail of social media. Facebook has many tools that help businesses target their ideal audience and virtually anyone can benefit from their blog-like format. It gives content more breathing room than other sites such as Twitter and brands have access to over a billion users. Twitter is also a very popular platform but unlike Facebook, it has a microblogging format. Users really benefit from the real-time aspect of Twitter, since many news reporters and leaders in the global economy are actively posting to the site. LinkedIn can be considered as a Facebook for business owners and job seekers. The site serves as a great connector, helping its users form professional connections and find new clients. LinkedIn pages can be a great way of building a potential customer base. Pinterest as discussed early is very popular among women. The platform works well with businesses within the arts, fashion, and lifestyle industries. Product images can be posted to brand’s pages under categorized albums and shared with Twitter and Facebook easily. Instagram and Google+ are the newer hybrids, both bearing characteristics of Twitter and Facebook. Google+ profiles are beneficial to anyone who wants to enhance their SEO. Instagram is a way to share experiences through pictures which can be categorized through hashtag keywords (“How to find,” 2014).

In order to optimize engagement, content needs to be spread out across multiple social media platforms. There is much debate on whether content or conversation increases engagement.  Based on personal experience, content drives conversation. One does not trump another. They both need to be used in conjunction to optimize social media. The right content posted on a regular basis will drive conversation on and off social media networks. The hard part is determining the right content to post that is relevant to the brand’s strategy and cohesively integrating it across social media networks. As discussed early social media networks are not created equal and based on targeted customer groups, one platform might need to receive more attention than others.

An example of content driving conversation is with Nissan’s online newsroom space. Nissan sought to harness the power of revamping its online newsroom space to create a “multi-market, multi-language, hemisphere-wide news site with a goal of making journalist’s life easier.” With the help of Wieck, a media relations agency, Nissan was able to repurpose content in an attractive, fluid, and engaging way. They wanted to create a more modern, eye-catching design and foster broader appeal. The overall goal of the revamp was to build a hub of information to make it easy for journalists to quickly gather videos, press releases, pictures, and other data needed to inform stories. All the videos, posts, and images on the site were shareable and downloadable to allow for WOM marketing. The site also allows visitors to easily access Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Google+, and email to share content. Nissan’s Facebook and Twitter accounts are regularly populated with stories from the newsroom to integrate all three platforms. Nissan’s site is clean, navigable, attractive, and informative and it is easy to understand the message the car company wants to convey upon entering the site.  The revamped content on the site helped grow from over 90,000 unique visitors each month per month to more than 300,000 visitors per month in a short amount of time (“Nissan drives the,” 2013).

Personal Case Study: Ideal Image

            Ideal Image is a small image consulting company that was formerly one of my clients. Their target audience is females between the ages of 35 and 49, who are transitioning in their lives. The company wanted to use social media to establish an online presence and consistent branding, increase website traffic, and create and maintain relationships with clients and prospects. The social media plan created for the company used multiple social media channels to optimize engagement. Facebook was used to increase the brand’s awareness and engagement due to its wide reach. It was also used because Facebook has been attracting an older demographic as Millennials have gravitated to other channels. Facebook served as the top platform for Ideal Image to engage their target market of Generation Xers. The next channel used was Pinterest which worked as a way to increase awareness, engagement, and solicit recommendations. Pinterest allowed the brand to share items with followers in a creative and engaging way. The site is ideal for recommendations and WOM marketing which is why it was incorporated into the social marketing strategy.  Ideal Image also incorporated their blog into the social media strategy because it was a way to increase awareness and engagement with prospective clients. The blog worked well with current marketing efforts and was incorporated into the company’s site. Integrating Facebook, Pinterest, and the blog served as a way to achieve social media objectives for a small business owner.

 References:

 (2012). Battle of the Sexes [Web Graphic]. Retrieved from http://8.mshcdn.com/wp

content/uploads/2012/07/BattleofTheSexesSocialWeb.jpg

How to find the right social media platform for your business?. (2014, January 04).

Retrieved from http://blog.macronimous.com/how-to-find-the-right-social-media-platform-for-your-business/

Nissan drives the conversation with content marketing-focus website. (2013). Retrieved

from http://www.prdaily.com/awards/specialedition/218.aspx

Wells, M. (2014). Lesson 3. Retrieved from PI Reed School of Journalism, WVU. (2014).

Retrieved from

https://ecampus.wvu.edu/bbcswebdav/courses/star15879.201401/docs/lesson3.htm

Why it’s Important to Watch your Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who come to a site and leave within a few seconds. A high bounce rate can show that visitors didn’t like what they saw or didn’t find what they were looking for (“What’s more important:,” 2012). KissMetrics developed the infographic shown below to “demystify” the bounce rate. Visitors can bounce from a site for a number of reasons such as clicking on a link to a page on a different website, clicking the back button, or typing a new URL. As shown below, the average bounce rate is 40.5% with simple landing pages with one call to action having the highest bounce rate of 70-90% (“Bounce rate demystified,” 2010).

            Bounce rate was designed to tell sites if they have the right audience coming to their page and if they are meeting visitor’s expectations. In order to understand bounce rate it’s important to understand the difference between bounce rate and exit rate. Bounce rate applies to a visit entry/landing page and exit rate applies to the page a visit exits/leaves on. Exit rate applies to where people are exiting mid-stream from a site’s conversion funnel (Kelly, 2012).

            There are two common tracking issues that inflate bounce rate that sites have to be aware of to make sure their data is more reliable. Sometimes users can click an external link that isn’t necessarily negative. For example, during a visit a user clicks on a link that brings them to an external site such as an account login that requires secure authentication. To combat this, Google Analytics, allows users to have an outbound link that is tracked as an interaction or non-interaction event to determine if the click effects bounce rate.  Another tracking issue is if a site is improperly tagged with tracking code. For example if landing page X has different tracking code settings than page Y and a visitor moves from X to Y, the result will be that page X will have an inaccurate bounce rate (Kelly, 2012).

            There are many factors that affect bounce rate such as the industry, brand credibility, type of site, and the stage of the customer lifecycle. A high bounce rate can be acceptable when the visitor has a positive experience. There are many visitor interactions that are undervalued and ultimately lead to desired conversions in either the short or long-term. For example, “Contact us” is a common and accepted page with a high bounce rate because the visitor just wants basic information about the business. Another example is blog articles, where on a high traffic blog that uses CPM Ad Monetization to make money with a high returning visitor rate, a bounce rate of 89% of higher is acceptable. Blogs offer interesting articles and the visitor leaves after getting value from the article (Kelly, 2012). 

            Segmenting data can help determine a page’s actual bounce rate. In aggregate the bounce rate could look good or bad but not segmenting the data can hide substantial problems. One way to better evaluate a site is segmenting data based on location. For example, if a company is a local business in San Francisco, they should expect a high bounce rate from outside of California. Segmenting the traffic will allow the business to see how traffic is performing in a local area and avoid being skewed by irrelevant visits. Another segment is new vs. returning customers. A returning visitor has different intent than a new visitor. It’s common for new visitors to have a higher bounce rate than returning visitors since they are less familiar with the brand (Kelly, 2012).

            Reducing the bounce rate on pages that have the highest volume of traffic from the highest converting sources means more engaged visitors and a greater change of conversion. There are a few things to consider in reducing a sites bounce rate. The first is avoiding pop-ups because they annoy people and usually disrupt the user experience. Also don’t upset visitors by not providing them with clear and obvious paths to get the content they are looking for. Poor design can also play a part in a high bounce rate. Users are becoming less tolerable of unattractive websites and the content presented needs to be attractive in terms of graphics and readability. Speed is an important factor as well with it not only impacting bounce rate but also causes follower reach to stall, negatively impact search rankings, and destroys the conversion rate. Lastly a site needs to be mobile friendly. With the rise of mobile, the language on these sites need to be simple and clear enough for people on the go to find the information they are looking for (Eubanks, 2013).

References:

(2010). Bounce Rate Demystified [Print Photo]. Retrieved from

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/bounce-rate/

Eubanks, N. (2013, December 27). Reduce bounce rate: 20 things to consider. Retrieved from

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2237250/Reduce-Bounce-Rate-20-Things-to-Consider

Kelly, K. (2012, February 15). What is bounce rate? avoid common pitfalls. Retrieved from

http://www.blastam.com/blog/index.php/2012/02/what-is-bounce-rate/

What's more important: Page views or unique visitors. (2012, July 18). Retrieved from

http://blog.agilitycms.com/whats-more-important-page-views-or-unique-visitors

What Exactly are Unique Visitors?

            “Unique visitors are defined as the number of inferred individual people (filtered for spiders and robots), within a designated reporting time frame with activity consisting of one or more visits to a site. Each individual is counted only once in the unique visitor measure for the reporting period” (Hamel, 2008). Unique visitors are always calculated for a time period and a time reference. Some examples of time periods measured are days, weeks, and months.

The most predominant method of identifying unique visitors is via a persistent cookie that stores and returns a unique ID value. Other methods of inferring unique visitors uses tricks to come up with a fair count of unique visitors for example looking at the combination of browser version, host OS, or IP address. One theory is that the most accurate way of counting unique visitors is to use an account ID, but still sites will have non-authenticated users (Hamel, 2008).

Some studies show that 97% of users accept cookies and with that statistic the accuracy of the unique visitor count will be as high as 99.5%. However there has also been contradictory research that shows a large percentage of people delete their cookies automatically or manually every month. This means that the longer the time reference analyzed, the less accurate the unique visitors will be. For example if Susan automatically deletes her cookies once a month and a company wants to get monthly unique visitors based on a full year reference, she will be counted 12 times instead of just once (Hamel, 2008).

Other issues come into play calculating unique visitors when people use multiple devices, which is now majority of the population. If Susan accesses one site using Internet Explorer on her work computer, then visits the same site using Safari on her iPhone, and goes home and looks at the same site using Google Chrome on her personal computer, that’s 3 unique visits for one user. Multiple devices have the potential for companies to have an inflated impression of their unique visitors (Hamel, 2008).

There is some debate on which matters more page views or unique visitors. Page views are important for publishers because each page view tallies an ad impression for each ad on the page. If their ads are sold on a cost per thousand views or CPM basis, this is an important number for them to grow. However the unique visitor metric gives companies a sense of the size of their audience. The importance of this metric depends on the purpose of the site or publication. Brands might want to maximize the number of people that come to their site with little regard to how many pages they access, as long as the follow a chosen path through the site. Niche publishers may not have a huge audience and want to show loyalty and engagement by clicking deep into the site, generating page views (“What’s more important:,” 2012).

In October of 2012 Google+ attracted 105 million unique visitors compared to 65.3 million in October 2011, a 60.9% increase. In that same time period Facebook had 822.1 million unique visitors, up 4.3% from 788.2 million the previous year. Twitter had 182.9 million unique visitors and LinkedIn claimed 161.9 million. Google can use the information provided about their unique visitors to see if they have accomplished their growth figures for the year. These unique visitors are calculated as users and they can use this data to identify the success of their social media platform. They saw extreme growth in a year compared to Facebook, which is their top competitor. This metric also allows them to see how they compare to the competition. Even though they might have a smaller number of users, the growth the company is seeing from year to year shows that it is becoming a successful social media platform (Wasserman, 2013).

At the end of the day, the most important factor for growing unique visitors is content. If the content is not engaging and relevant to users, they are going to “bounce” and never come back (“What’s more important:,” 2012).

References:

Hamel, S. (2008, January 08). [Web log message]. Retrieved from

http://blog.immeria.net/2008/01/understanding-unique-visitors.html

Wasserman, T. (2013, January 03). Report: Google has 105 million unique monthly visitors.

Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2013/01/03/google-has-105-million/

What's more important: Page views or unique visitors. (2012, July 18). Retrieved from

http://blog.agilitycms.com/whats-more-important-page-views-or-unique-visitors

About Me

Hi everyone my name is Britney Ambers and I'm a grad student in West Virginia University's Integrated Marketing Communications program. I received my undergrad degree in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing from Christopher Newport University, in Newport News.Currently I work as a Graphic Designer for General Dynamics Information Technology. This is my first time studying Web Metrics and SEO and as I learn new things about the topic, I plan to share them with you. Thanks for following!