To Choose and Sustain Social Media, Look at Content, Audience and Metrics

When a company or organization decides to utilize social media as a marketing channel, the primary objective should be to drive engagement, interaction and conversation. But as in life, there are many kinds of conversations to have, depending on the situation and the people you’re chatting with. The organization has to decide the flavor of the conversations it can best start and sustain based on its business and its customers; those decisions will drive number of and types of social media platforms it spends time and money on. 

I will play out this social media platform selection process using the example of a community college. Given that these institutions deal with many different programs, services, offerings and audiences, they will most likely need to employ at least a few platforms to allow such varied content and appeal more directly to certain segments of their audience. Plus, once platforms are selected, content has to be carefully monitored and measured to ensure engagement is being maximized.

   

Types of Conversation

The first step to finding the right social platform(s) for your organization is to look inward and determine what you have to offer social users, that is, the kind of conversation starters in which you can excel, and then see which platform is most conducive to those. Examples of questions you may ask at this point include, “What is theunique purpose of this platform?” and “Do its attributes relate to mybusiness’s needs?” 

A community college has a variety of content to share -- helpful how-tos about enrolling and succeeding in college, news and information about campus life and offerings, personal stories of students and staff, and much more. The mostflexible platform that allows for such variety is Facebook. There’s a reason it is said that “Almost any business can benefit from having a Facebook page."

But some of the college’s news needs to get out quickly and succinctly, such as sports scores, day-of event reminders and so on. Given that Twitter is more of an “in the moment” type of platform, the college may also choose to use it as a social platform. 

Then there is the college’s Workforce Development arm, which offers professional development courses and training to local businesses and professionals. To convey that area’s expertise and reach more of a B2B audience, the college may want to establish a presence on LinkedIn. And assuming there is a robust library of imagery to use – campus photos, student photos, etc. – a visual platform like Instagram or Snapchat may also be useful.  

Confirm Audiences are in the Room

Of course, just because these are the kinds of conversations the college feels prepared to have with its students and district residents doesn’t mean those audiences feel the same way. Before launching on any of these social media platforms, the college, like any other organization, has to make sure its prospective and/or current customers are in the room, so to speak. 

Start by looking at third-party data regarding the platform’s demographics and usage statistics to find out. Not only is Facebook the most versatile platform in terms of content possibilities, it’s also the largest in terms of user base. More than 70%of adult Internet users are active on the platform; in other words, 62% ofAmerican adults are on Facebook. 

Compare that to LinkedIn, where just a quarter of online adults are active. Still, when it comes to audiences, quality trumps quantity, and LinkedIn can deliver the desired audience for those professional training opportunities. “Fully 46% of online adults who have graduated from college are LinkedIn users, compared with just 9% of online adults with a high school diploma or less." LinkedIn also skews a bit older as the only major social media platform where users ages 30-49 outnumber those ages 18-29.

To reach its core audience of current high schoolers and other young adults looking for traditional college courses, visual platforms may be the college’s best choice.Just over 40% of smartphone owners ages 18-29 use an auto-delete messaging app like Snapchat, while 55% use Instagram. 

Third-party data is valuable, but so too is any organizational data you can bring to bear on the decision. For example, an organization can upload its current customer lists to Facebook and see how many matches there are; that will demonstrate what percentage of your current customers use that platform. 

Of course, another option to find out not only where customers are, but where they want to engage with you, is to ask them directly through a customer survey. Sure, third-party data tells us that a majority of young people are using Snapchat, but given its private, ephemeral nature, are they really looking to engage with brands there or just their friends? A survey can answer that question for your organization.  

Is Conversation Lively or Listless?

Once an organization establishes a presence on a social media platform, the work is far from over. Granted, if you’ve done solid work on determining content and audience up front, no chosen platform should be an absolute failure or waste of resources. Still, you must continually test your conversation starters to see if they’re resonating and driving that all important interaction. Most platforms have built-in analytics tools that track things like comments, shares, etc. To get even more sophisticated, a marketer can do as Chris Lake suggests and create an “interaction index” in which different kinds of interactions are scored differently based on audience effort and engagement value. For example, a comment would be scored higher than a like as it requires more effort on the part of the user and so denotes a higher level of involvement. Marketers can then look at what kinds of content and posts generate the highest interaction scores and add more of those to their editorial calendars. They can also compare interaction scores by platform to see which deserve the most time and resources.    

Conclusion

Entrepreneur’s website asserts, “When it comes to choosing which social media platforms you'll utilize, select those that offer the best potential for reaching your ideal audience and broadcast the type of media you've decided is best suited for your company." I agree with that formula of content/media plus audience for the initial platforms choice; however, when it comes to determining ongoing resource allocation and measuring overall success, organizations must also add in meaningful interaction/engagement metrics.     

Exit Pages – Leaving the Online Party

Leaving a party can be easy or difficult. The hosts can be glad to see you go or be begging you to stay. Sometimes you leave the same way you came in; sometimes you mingle a bit and exit through a different door. Just like parties, leaving websites can be complicated but inevitable. Given that inevitability, should site analysts even worry about where visitors are leaving their sites? That is, what is the value of knowing a site’s common exit pages?  

Exit Pages vs. Bounces  

Opentracker’s definition is a good one: an exit page is “the last page a visitor views before leaving your site." And because, like party guests, visitors can’t stay on your site forever, some poor page has to take the fall as the exit page, right?  That’s exactly the argument Avinash Kaushik makes in his book, Web Analytics 2.0, writing, “[Visitors’] exit from a page is no indication of the greatness, or lack thereof, of that particular page!” (2010, p. 54). 

He goes on to argue that exit pages and rates are not half as useful their close cousin, the bounce rate, which more quickly reveals what he calls “bad” exits (2010, p. 54). That’s because bounce rates point out dud pages that serve as both entrance and exit – bounces are like a party guest peeking in the door, being so horrified by who/what they see in there that they don’t even take off their coat, have a drink or eat an appetizer, but instead back slowly out and run the other way down the street. 

Stepped Processes

Of course, we hope most party guests at least come inside and mingle a bit, and while they all must ultimately leave, as hosts, we feel there are more and less opportune times for them to do so. This becomes especially important when parties are structured sequentially, say a three-course dinner party. If I invite you to such an event, I expect you to stay for all three courses; if you left after the appetizer or the main course, without staying through to dessert, I would question my cooking and/or our friendship. 

Such sequential structured experiences are the rare instances in which Kaushik advocates for the importance of exit pages (2010, p. 55). If there is a stepped process online, say getting from a product detail page to a shopping cart page to a payment page, it becomes extremely important to know how many visitors aren’t completing the full process and from what page they seem to be dropping off. 

   

Brian Gavin Diamonds became alarmed when pages in their checkout process were among the site’s most exited. In fact, they figured that more than $500k in sales were being abandoned in shoppers’ carts each month. Using that data, they instituted a new “guest” checkout process and saw 60% more online visitors actually complete their purchases.  

Internal Search

While not a stepped process, internal site search is another area that can be improved by examining exit page/rate metrics. Tom Bowen argues that if the internal site search results page is one of your site’s top exit pages, it clearly means that users aren’t finding what they’re looking for, as they aren’t making any further clicks. Since internal site search is so heavily relied upon as a navigational tool, such a finding would definitely be worth a second look. 

Let Them Leave – But at the Right Time

Your site is like an online party you’re throwing, and sure, you don’t mind that guests leave (in fact, at some point you’d insist), but you do want it to be on good terms and at the right time. Exit pages can help you determine that.

Events – Actions Beyond Page Views

Today’s online experience goes beyond simple page views; nowadays, to really engage users, sites must also employ multimedia like videos and interactivity like tools that allow customers to customize products. All these features are important indicators of site engagement, but since they don’t operate like standard html pages, they can’t be tracked as such. Enter events and event tracking.  

Video

As analytics guru Avinash Kaushik writes in Web Analytics 2.0, event tracking “creates new metrics that capture the unique experience of rich media” (2010, p. 123).

One of the most dominant forms of rich media on the Web right now is video. Television network PBS wanted to know what kind of videos their Web users were viewing and in what ways, and so they turned to Luna Metrics and the event tracking functionality of Google Analytics. Armed with the information they found, they made the business decision to create two new video portals – a standard one and one especially for kids. 

Downloads, Galleries and Tools

But rich media is just one of the categories of interactions event tracking can keep tabs on. Kayden Kelly lists several others in one of his blog posts, including printing pages, downloading pdfs, interacting with a rotating slideshow/photo gallery or using site tools like calculators, quizzes, etc.  

Being able to track these important actions is crucial to the success of any site. Oftentimes downloads are a key conversion goal on a landing page and so must be trackable. Knowing which of a slideshow’s images/content resonates the most helps a site better tailor its galleries moving forward. 

In the case of interactive tools or widgets, it isn’t enough to know that users land on the pages that contain them; much insight can be gleaned if a site analyst has access to if and how visitors use them. Kaushik uses Toyota’s Adobe-Flash-driven interactive car configurator tool as an example (2010, p. 123). Upon seeing the data that customers most often chose to customize the transmission (over more vain, less important features like color), the company rethought its perceptions of and marketing to its audience (Kaushik, 2010).  

Same-Page Calls to Action

Event tracking results can also force site developers to rethink their calls to action. The Moz Blog gives the example of their sister site, SEOmoz.org (Henry, 2010). That site had a page that included two very different looking calls to action, but which each took visitors to the same page. So if the referral page and the destination page are the same, how could developers know which CTA was performing better? That’s right – make each one a unique trackable event and then compare the data. 

SEOmoz.org used event tracking to see which of the two highlighted calls to action (both of which led to the same page destination) was performing better.

Everyday vs. Special Events

It seems like there was a time, not long ago, when events and event tracking were considered “advanced” analytics -- not anymore. As the Web, its content and its level of interactivity have all grown more sophisticated, so too have the metrics used to describe them. Events are no longer special but just ordinary and everyday, which may be how often you’ll use them to guide your site decisions.