Post Category → Advertising & Marketing

Which Social Media Metrics Really Matter

Josue of Engagebit.com has asked 55 experts the following question: “If you could measure social media success with only 3 metrics, which 3 would you choose?”

The result is a resounding consensus on the importance of Engagement, followed by Traffic and lastly Conversion. Engagement refers to the level of activity (i.e the comments, likes, retweets, shares etc.) that goes on on the social sites, websites or blogs of that particular brand, product or a campaign. Traffic is obvious, the more traffic the site receives the more awareness and revenue it’s going to generate. And lastly, for most product campaigns, it’s all about the bottom line – revenue. So obviously driving conversions will be the key, be it user registrations or sales.

socialmediamatters

You can read the individual answers from all 55 experts here. I was honored and humbled to be included in the list too, you can read my response here. Thanks to Josue for the great work!

 

It’s the “retweets” that count

Latest study by HP Labs suggests that “The correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected. This is a reflection of the fact that for information to propagate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it.”

That means it’s the retweets that really matter, and if you are a social networking advertiser you might want to find out the retweet rates of your twitter users that you are advertising on. Otherwise, if no one retweets their tweets, you might be wasting your money.

Because the research suggests that there are users with: 1) many followers and low relative infuence, and 2) users with fewer followers but high relative infuence. If you were to choose one of two, you should go for the second type of users. Because that way your message will be heard by a lot more people.

As we know twitter is like a river, at any given time you can only see the latest tweets and everything else is a history… So unless your “message” is retweeted, it’s as good as it’s dead.

I am just rumbling here, but I hope you know what I am getting at. Here is the research:

Influence and Passivity in Social Media – HP Labs Research

Results: Guest posting on Problogger.net

Around 1.5 months ago I guest-blogged on Darren’s blog Problogger.net. It was titled “5 Ways to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours“.

Today I would like to share with you the results of this exercise.

I think the success of the guest-blogging depends on many things, eg;

  • Authority, traffic, user-base… of the blog that you are guest-blogging.
  • Topic of your guest-post; how interesting it is, how beneficial it is, how well it is written etc.
  • What you have done to capture the new visitors to your blog?

So, as you can see the variables are many. For this reason, it’s very difficult to analyze one guest-post at one particular blog and apply the results on other bogs. However, for simplicity reasons, let’s say what economists like to say “ceteris paribus (all other things being equal)” and proceed with the results. I am sure the results will be beneficial to many bloggers, despite the fact that it’s based on one guest-post on Problogger. Just remember to keep those variables in mind if you decide to guest blog on other blogs. Do some basic research on the blog and its followers, niche, traffic etc. before deciding to give away one of your best articles.

Should you give away your best articles as guest-posts?

When I was done with my blog post titled “5 Ways to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours“, I was about to push that “publish” button in my WordPress and then I remembered “How about I give away this blog post as guest-post to some high-traffic blog?”. I was satisfied with the quality of the post so I decided to test if it is worth to give away your best articles as guest-posts.

I quickly made a list of potential blogs that I could send my guest-post to. From a handful of blogs that I have selected, Problogger definitely stood out, so I sent a quick email to Darren.

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Showing ads only to people who came from Search Engines

It’s a fact that people do not like ads and they hate it when they appear inside blog posts 😉

It’s also fact that bounce rate for traffic from search engines is very high. Most of the time it’s above 60% for any blog. That means these people search for something in Search Engines, see your blog in the results, come to your blog searching for whatever they have searched, stay there for 5-20 seconds and then they are gone. Let’s hope that they have found what they were looking for…

So, how about showing ads to these bouncers only and not to your regular readers? Seems like a good idea.

WP Plugins

There are few plugins which can do that. The newest being the DailyBlogTips’ Search Ads plugin. It’s a simple plugin with simple interface. You install it and put a code that you want to show to visitors from Search Engines or from any site for that matter. Actually you can put any code in the HTML field; welcome message, subscribe to RSS message etc. But of course, for monetization purposes you will put Google AdSense ads.

There is also a more advanced plugin from Ozh called Who Sees Ads. With this plugin you can tweak the behavior of your plugin more accurately.