Creating a Social Media Analytics Action Plan : Part 1

Creating a Social Media Analytics Action Plan – Part 1: Defining KPIs

Last week I spoke at PubCon South on the Analytics Strategy panel on the topic of social media. This is something I’m very passionate about and during my preparation for the presentation I uncovered some scary statistics.

According to a survey conducted by BazaarVoice in 2009, on average businesses have no idea what their ROI is on any type of social media activity:

                    

Here are a few of the lowlights highlights:

• 53% of respondents are unsure about their return on Twitter
• 50% are unsure about the direct value of LinkedIn
• 50% are not sure how to measure the impact on business metrics from blogs

And yet, companies now-a-days have no problem investing thousands of dollars into social media marketing even if they have no idea if they’ll profit from it. Why have companies gotten so lazy when it comes to marketing spend?

Part of the problem is they aren’t properly analyzing their data. Social networks are giving us more and more insight into visitor and performance metrics, but most of us aren’t properly setup to find actionable insights on the campaign’s performance.

This series of posts will explain how to properly setup your social media strategy so that you can make better-informed decisions, understand your ROI and adjust your strategy according to the numbers.
Let’s get started. Before you do anything else, you need to have a clear understanding of what your goal will be and how you will measure the success of your social media strategy. In other words, we need to define KPIs.

There are a couple of guidelines you should follow when definining KPIs:

• Choose metrics that actually translate into business context (e.g. sales, new leads, customer satisfaction, customer interaction, etc.)
• Define more than just attention metrics
  (You want to look at more important metrics than just your fan/follower count)
• Define KPIs that are actionable
  (How does knowing what your retweet reach is help you adjust your Twitter strategy?)
• Create specific KPIs for each social network and specific elements of your website

 The most important guideline above is to define actionable KPIs. Obviously these types of KPIs are going to be unique to your business, but here are a few examples of what I would consider good actionable KPIs:

• Number of people in a specific location who follow your company on Twitter
• Reduction in sales cycles
• Reduction in support costs
• Increase in product reviews
• Product improvement suggestions from [specific social network]

Now that we have your KPIs established, we need to configure your analytics.Now lets walk you through that process in part 2 of Creating a Social Media Analytics Action Plan.

 Source:
Creating a Social Media Analytics Action Plan – Part 1: Defining KPIs

Types of Site Changes That Can Affect SEO

Types of Site Changes That Can Affect SEO

Organizations make many changes that they do not think will affect SEO, but they have a big impact on it. Here are some examples:

• Content areas/features/options added to the site (this could be anything from a new blog
  to a new categorization system).
• Changing the domain of your site. This can have a significant impact, and you should
  document when the switchover was made.
• Modifications to URL structures. Changes to URLs on your site will likely impact your
  rankings, so record any and all changes.
• Implementing a new CMS. This is a big one, with a very big impact. If you must change
  your CMS, make sure you do a thorough analysis of the SEO shortcomings of the new
  CMS versus the old one, and make sure you track the timing and the impact.
• New partnerships that either send links or require them (meaning your site is earning new
  links or linking out to new places).
• Changes to navigation/menu systems (moving links around on pages, creating new link
  systems, etc.).
• Any redirects, either to or from the site.
• Upticks in usage/traffic and the source (e.g., if you get mentioned in the press and receive
  an influx of traffic from it).

When you track these items, you can create an accurate storyline to help correlate causes with effects. If, for example, you’ve observed a spike in traffic from Yahoo! that started four to five days after you switched from menu links in the footer to the header, it is a likely indicator of a causal relationship.

Without such documentation it could be months before you notice the surge--and there would be no way to trace it back to the responsible modification. Your design team might later choose to switch back to footer links, your traffic may fall, and no record would exist to help you understand why. Without the lessons of history, you are doomed to repeat the same mistakes.

A New Age For Search Marketers

We are in the midst of the largest algorithmic changes to Google’s relevancy since the Florida Update of 2003, and perhaps even the largest change for how marketers approach search since Google and Inktomi revolutionized the concept of citation based rankings. The interesting part of this change is that it is not focused on one concept, but rather several, that mixed together change the face of search as we move into the new year.

What makes this change so important is that the future of search, whether it be Search “2.0″ or Caffeine oriented, is based on much more than the relevancy factors of content, links, queries and relevant infrastructure. This new “Search-o-morphis” brings factors into play which include site usability, site mobility, the presence of the site socially and also more and more offpage factors which go beyond traditional linking.

• Personalized Search Changes
• Real Time Search
• Growth of Android and Personalized Mobile Search
• Social Search
• Bing Growing into legitimate option 2

These concepts individually have an effect, but combined they leave search relevancy heading in a direction that will leave SERPs looking far different than they did in 2009.

Looking at the way these changes are making search as a whole move, SEOs are going to have to focus on two new concepts in their marketing plan in 2010:

1. Social Media
2. Mobile Search

Why is social media so important? Well, since social media is such an all encompassing metric, let’s look at one aspect of social media : the sharing of information.

In 1998, links were important in the Google Citation algorithm because links were the way that people shared information and gave recommendations online. In 1998, in order to link to something, you usually had to hardcode a link in the HTML of your website. Doing so could take minutes to code, and hours to FTP via dial up, and if someone put that much time into linking to a site … well, that site must be of value, wouldn’t it have?

With blogging, things changed. Blogging came into the forefront in 2003 with Google’s acquisition of Blogger.com and ultimately Google’s launch of AdSense; which monetized blogs and led to a new economic culture of self publishing. With anyone having the ability to launch a blog with the click of a button, any novice now had the ability to link. Links are easier to achieve, easier to manipulate and much more valuable, since the link is no longer the voice of few, but the voice of many.

Enter microblogging and socially networked sharing, with Twitter and more predominantly Facebook. If Twitter is to an HTML link what Facebook is to mass blog linking. This analogy means basically that in my opinion, Twitter will hit its early adopter plateau while almost anyone will join Facebook, connect with friends and share information with others.

What’s our point?

Our point is that if Google is to still work off of a citation based algorithm based on relevant conversations and suggestions of websites using keywords, then the engine is going to have to catch up to the world of social media. Because bloggers don’t just blog anymore, they share thoughts and relevant information on Twitter and Facebook. If Dave’s mom reads something interesting, he’ll share it on Facebook. If Loren’s wife runs across a great recipe, she may tweet it out. Hence, microblogging.

If blogging has become microblogging, then linking should become micro-linking (ie. URL Shorteners).

If Google fails to incorporate social media signals via Twitter & Facebook sharing, TinyURL’s and other conversations … then they would be ignoring the direction of the Internet.

Search Engine Basics

As the Internet started to grow and became an integral part of day-to-day work, it became almost impossible for a user to fetch the exact or relevant information from such a huge web.

This is the main reason why ‘Search Engines’ were developed. Search engines became so popular that now more than 80% of web-site visitors come from them. What exactly is a Search Engine? According to webopedia, a “Search Engine” is a program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found”.