It’s a bank holiday here in Ireland so this weeks social 7 has a few how to posts to keep you occupied. Including how to merge your Facebook pages, how to optimise your Linkedin Profile and how to get started with Google authorship. For those of you not full of energy I’ve thrown in some great reading too.
Beyond Klout: Better ways to measure social media influence
Those of you who follow my tweets or this blog on a regular basis will know I’m not a massive fan of Klout. Although I sometimes find it hard to resist looking at my Klout score and comparing it to others it’s a slippery slope, I simply don’t believe it’s a good measure of Influence. When I use other methods to assess how far messages spread and how much real traffic they generate I can see that it’s very often inaccurate. That’s not even to get in to the privacy issues.
This article from Read Write Web shows some alternative ways to measure social media influence. I for one had never looked at the analytics on Topsy before and found it a great way to benchmark myself against my competitors. I’d highly recommend reading this if you want to improve your social media strategy. I may well find myself reviewing Topsy for a cool tool some time soon.
Google authorship – what is it and how can you set it up?
It was just a couple of weeks ago when I first heard about Google authorship and since then I’ve seen articles popping up about it everywhere. Google authorship will attach you to the content you have written, displaying a small image of you along with search results. This has lots of benefits, it establishes you as an expert and gives your post more traction on the Google search results page.
It’s my first task for the bank holiday weekend to apply for this and here’s a handy post from Hubspot on how to get started.
Where is all your website traffic really coming from?
Ironically I found this article from a friend’s share on Facebook. In the age of Facbook and Twitter we are all expecting to see traffic to our websites come from these channels and of course we do however I’m sure like me there is a large portion of traffic that comes from unknown sources, so where are they coming from? What channels are we neglecting? Read this to find out.
This doesn’t mean we should take the foot off the pedal with our social media. Firstly I’m not sure you can really target those people using IRC chatrooms for example, we have to remember those who are sharing our links or visiting our websites by email or other ‘dark’ channels still have to find our content in the first place and for that reason we need to make sure it’s easy to find on Google and on social networks.
The best time to send emails to your clients
I can be very cynical about these ‘best time to post’ statistics. Firstly I know it can vary widely for different businesses, secondly as soon as it becomes common knowledge that ‘the best day of the week to post to your blog is Thursday’ everyone seems to jump on the bandwagon and suddenly you have way more to read on a Thursday than is possible. Having said all that I do like to experiment with the best time to send out email newsletters, more because I might as well try the timings that others suggest than try and guesstimate myself. What I’ve learnt from this is that the best time to send varies. One month people may love the early Saturday morning mail, the next month they may not be interested at that time of the day. It’s also hard to measure unless you split test the email and make sure both groups are equal in time subscribed to the list etc.
I shall however continue experimenting and the data on this Infographic looks interesting, I love the way it apportions the time slots to eating pizza and washing children. (Discovered via Naomi Trower)
How to merge up to 6 Facebook pages
There’s great stuff coming out of Jon Loomer’s blog at the moment. And this post is the second task you might want to set yourself for the weekend. When you search for your business name on Facbook do you find multiple pages appear? Some of these might be location pages or pages that you may have abandoned, they could even be community pages that appear when someone says they work in your organisation. Thankfully Facebook now allows you to merge up to 6 pages so you can gather all the likes from these various places on one page. Here is Jon’s tutorial.
13 quick tips to optimise your LinkedIn profile
Linkedin has gone through a massive amount of change in the last through months, logging in to the site now you will find it much easier on the eye, you’ll also notice you’ve been getting ‘endorsements’ for your skills. I always think it’s worth reviewing your Linkedin profile every six months. Each time you do it you will improve it, this is definitely one of my tasks for the weekend and I’ll be following the tips in this post from Isra Garcia on Social Media Today.
Your Facebook posts don’t reach your Likes – Is there anything you can do?
That meme has raised it’s ugly head again, you know the one, it’s posted by Facebook page owners begging their fans to make sure they have their posts showing in their newsfeeds. It was irrelevant the first time round and it’s irrelevant now. So is there anything that can be done to fix the number of people who see your posts that doesn’t involve paying? Find out in this excellent post by Carole Billingsley on Social media today.
And from Spiderworking.com
Last week I was at the Dublin Web Summit and I’ve been sharing some of the insights and interviews that I picked up whilst there.
Social media and customer service
One of the first presentations I saw and one that really resonated with me was Joshua March from Conversocial who talked about customer service. It got me thinking about how we as small businesses can translate these tips into our social media strategies. Read more here.
How to find out what people on social media want
I was lucky enough to grab Stephen O’Leary from O’Leary analytics after his talk on social media monitoring. Again there are some really simple tips that small businesses can put in place to help us find out what our customers really want.
The future is mobile – Niall Harbison
Listening to Niall Harbison made me feel slightly guilty. I know mobile is here and it’s big and it’s important and I’ll tell that to all my clients, it forms a big part of the training I offer, yet my own site isn’t mobile optimised. That’s why this week I’ve finally taken the plunge and started working on my website update.
Here’s some of the excellent tips Niall raised in his presentation and some ideas on how small business can embrace the mobile revolution.
That robot at the Dublin Web Summit
And finally, I can’t sign off without introducing you to one of the people I met at the Dublin Web Summit. Have a great weekend.
