Introduction.

Whether you are selling tickets, toys, or shoes, your overall goal is to use social media to gain recognition, incite curiosity, and then build trust in your brand – trust that will lead a customer to buy the product, and then do it again.

So you go to the websites that people are already on: Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, to name just a few, to build that recognition. When your contacts are curious enough, they may be drawn to your website. Hopefully, the trust you’ve laid the groundwork for on social media platforms will be solidified by your website, and you’ll land a sale.

Social media marketing can be time consuming, though, and it would be a comfort to know that your valuable time and effort is paying off in that desired trust. Only, you can’t measure trust. So how will you know you’re not wasting your time?

We hope this blog will give you some ideas for “finding your social yardstick,” which is to say, gauging your social media impact and how you might improve it. We’ve outlined four “layers” of building a social presence. They are “layers” and not “steps” since you never really move past any of the processes, but you build upon it, like floors in a building. Each of the lower levels must be maintained and adjusted to make sure the upper floors are still stable.

Layer 1: Optimize. Learning Pre-Social Networking Tools.

The goal of social marketing is to get the potential customer to your website. So, before you expend time and energy into Facebook, Twitter, or a blog, you’ll want to Optimize your website. Which is to say, you want the site to be everything it can be: eye-catching, professional, and easily navigable. Once a person has found your page, you want the layout that provides the greatest chance of a sale.

There are two very important tools for optimizing your site. One is Google Analytics. This is a free service, which can take some time to install on your website, depending on how it is built. Once your site is synced to Google Analytics, though, you can easily access more information about your website that you thought possible to track.

Learn how people find your site. Are they coming from Facebook by clicking on a successful ad? Are they running a search on Google? Analytics will even tell you what keywords in the a visitor typed in the search bar before they clicked the link to your site. Then, you can maximize on those keywords by using them as “Tags” on any photos, videos, or blogposts you publish to the internet.

Analytics will also give you a picture of how people are navigating through your site. One key statistic is your bounce rate: percentage of initial visitors who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. Knowing the bounce rate for each of your pages will let you know which ones are immediately disengaging. Analytics can also tell you which page most often leads to the goal (or purchase) page, which will let you know where you may already be doing something right.

Click here for the official tour of Google Analytics.

http://www.google.com/analytics/tour.html

With the information from Google Analytics in hand, you will be prepared to begin optimizing, using the aptly named Google Website Optimizer.

This tool combines website editing with a middle school science experiment. Say you have a home page for your website. On it, you show a banner, some text, and a menu for navigation, and you want to decrease your bounce rate for that page. You would like to try adding a photo, tweaking the text, and changing the color of the banner, but, as we all learned in our middle school science class, adding too many variables at once and not having a “control” will make it impossible to know which variable led to the change.

Enter the Optimizer’s Multivariate Test. Once it is synced to your website, you can submit multiple variables to the program. It will then mix and match the new variables with your existing components and provide comprehensive feedback on which combination led to the highest conversion rate: the number of site visitors who complete the desired action (clicking to the “Checkout” page, for instance) divided by the total visits.

How long you want to run Google Optimizer before you commit to a certain combination will probably depend on how much traffic you receive. More traffic means you’ll get faster statistics, but, ultimately, it’s up to you and your company.

Once your site is optimized, and even while it is optimizing, you’ll want to Push Traffic. Get people there. Keep in mind, though, that even once you’ve run Optimizer and found the best possible combination of photos and text, the internet is an ever-changing entity. Websites must be updated, and people’s expectations vary over time. Keep optimizing, and definitely keep getting feedback from Analytics.

Layer 2: Push Traffic. Getting Started with Social Media.

If you have no experience with social media, it is more than okay to start small. There are five steps to establishing your online presence, so it’s best to make a schedule. Decide how long you will spend on step one, lurking. Perhaps you’ll lurk on Facebook for two weeks to see what it’s about. Then break down that period of time further. Set aside the time to spend two hours on three days of the week lurking. Then do it.

1. Lurk. Sign-up for your social platform of choice. Whether it be Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, your first step is to explore. Watch what others are doing until you feel comfortable enough to jump in.

2. Presence. Create your profile, upload a video, post a picture or your first blogpost. Don’t be afraid to start very small. A blogpost does not need to be a five paragraph essay, and it doesn’t need to take you all day to write. Become a fan of some pages on Facebook and start following people on Twitter.

3. Consumption/ Conversation. This is the step at which you can begin to measure your effectiveness. Gain Facebook fans or Twitter followers. Get views on your YouTube video by posting links on other sites. Ask people questions at the end of your blogpost so you get comments. You want to get people talking to you.

4. Engagement. To keep those people talking to you, you’ll need to talk to them. Reach out into the online community. Set a numeric goal. For instance, “I will post great content often enough on my blog to get 10 comments this month!” Or maybe, “I will comment on two Facebook pages other than my company’s every day.” This is the time to step up your game to really produce great content, which will lead to…

5. Virality. This is the goal, in which other people start sharing your content. Maybe they’ve subscribed to your blog through an RSS feed (more on this later), or they are posting links to your YouTube videos on their Facebook profiles. Congratulations, you are viral.

You’ll find yourself cycling through steps 3 to 5 again and again as you upload new content, engage contacts to gain feedback, and push the video or picture to virality. Now, pick another social media platform and make a new schedule.

If you’ve got ten minutes right now, take a step forward in your social media presence, even if it’s a small one. Watch the tutorial for Analytics or Optimizer, or maybe just create a username on a social website you’re unfamiliar with and spend a few minutes exploring. If you’re well-established on a social network, try spending ten minutes posting on fans’ walls. Later this week, we’ll post Layers 3 and 4, which will feature more numeric tools for measuring your success!