This leads to many businesses simply abandoning their social media campaigns, which can be a big mistake. Don’t get me wrong, social media isn’t for everyone – and each platform be it Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Pinterest or something else, will have pro’s and con’s for each business sector, some working well, some not. For example, when was the last time you thought to look for accountancy services while skimming through Facebook? For a more in-depth look into the various social media options and how they may benefit your business, check out our previous article on promoting your business using social media, here I intend to discuss the various ways you can track the ROI of your social media campaign.

One of the reasons it can be hard to track the ROI of social media is because many businesses social media activities are mainly customer service and trouble-shooting specific customer issues, using social media this way is largely very successful. Other successful ways of using social media include using it to connect to customers and inform them of special events the way Bloor Homes do or to tell people about important news or developments the way Wavin do, but again is hard to track the ROI of.

So how do you go about tracking the ROI of Social Media?

More often then not, there isn’t a single clear, concise way to measure the ROI of your Social Media campaign, they ROI needs to be evaluated in a case by case manner depending on what you wished to achieve with each of the campaigns you run. However, there are some free tools out there that will allow you to gain access to some valuable insights which are useful in helping you track the ROI of your social media campaign.

Each of these is useful for tracking certain aspects of your campaign, so you may find depending on what you are hoping to achieve, and what platform you are using, you may need to use several of these tools to properly track the ROI.

HootSuite, Tweetdeck and Bit.ly – These three services help you track your social media traffic as they automatically shorten and track any URL’s you use in your social media posts, this allows you to see how many click-throughs you had on each link, where they came from , etc.

Klout is another free tool, which although has come under a lot of pressure about their lack of accuracy, can still be useful when you are trying to gauge how much interaction your social media campaign is getting. You can add many of your social media accounts and see how many people are talking about you. Klout can help you monitor your retweets, mentions, likes, comments and much more. Klout however can no help you track straight leads to your website.

Facebook insights – if you have a facebook page then there is an embedded tool to let you monitor your facebook page, it can tell you how much your fanbase has grown in the past month, how engaged your users are with your page, and how often your posts go viral. It can help you understand the demographics of the people interacting with your page, where the likers are coming from, what reach your campaign has, where the traffic has been referred from and much more. It takes some practice to find your way around, but is well worth the effort.

Google Analytics can help you to track any conversions if you set up goals (such as reaching a thankyou page after completing a form or giving contact details) to give you an idea of how many people are actually getting in touch with you regarding the product or service you offer.

Tracking the ROI of social media campaigns is an ongoing task, and there are more ways to do it coming online every day, but certain aspects will always be very difficult to track, but make sure you continue to take advantage of the developments in the tracking software to help you judge the ROI of your social media.

1: Registering before they can see your site.

You know the one, you click onto a site, and straight away, a huge pop up blocks any site content asking you to provide your email and a user name and password to “register” before you can actually see anything on the site. Although many marketers may suggest this is a good idea so that you can harvest email addresses for mail shots to potential clients, the reality is that many find it a real turn off and will leave your site rather then fill out details for a site that they as yet don’t know really interests them.

You can have a nice big “register now to gain access to exclusive content” button on your page, and have certain content “locked” until they register, which will encourage people to give up their details once they have seen your site has things that interest them, and they know they want to see more.

2: Autoplay videos/music

Imagine this, you are sat at work, browsing the net for a new job in your lunch break, you see a link that looks like it may have the perfect new job for you, you click it, and all of a sudden this booming voice comes from your speakers welcoming you to “job-for-you.com” your boss looks over his monitor and next thing you know you are being called into a meeting room for a “chat”.

Video’s and music on websites aren’t necessarily a bad thing, however having them set to play as soon as your visitor hits your site is – as there are many situations, not just the one outlined above, where it simply isn’t appropriate for the content to be played.

To avoid your potential client having to hastily back out of your website, possibly cursing and vowing never to visit again, set videos and other noisy ?items clearly on your page with a play button to allow your users to play them if they wish or at their leisure.

3: Not answering your potential clients need

It is easy to get distracted while writing content for your website, but this can be disastrous to your potential business, many web users are lazy by nature, and are looking for a “quick fix” for whatever problem has sent them onto the internet in the first place. If they land on your page, and can’t find the information they need quickly, can’t see how you would help them, or why they should use you over your competitors, they will leave and go to another website, taking their business with them.

Make sure you decide what the thrust of your page should be before you start writing, and keep this on a post-it note in eye-line so you can remind yourself if you go off on a tangent. Re-read the content before putting it live, to ensure that you have covered why people should use you, and that it is easy for them to contact you to make the sale.

4: Complex navigation

As websites get bigger and bigger, there is a temptation to just keep adding things to the navigation, but this isn’t always a good idea. Periodically go through your website, remove any content that is no longer relevant (make sure you put a 301 (permanent redirect) in place to either your home page, or to another page with relevant content so you don’t end up with the dreaded 404 (page not found) error) – this ensures that your site is fresh, that you don’t need complex navigation systems.

Again, people are lazy, all pages on your website should ideally be no more than three mouse clicks from each other. There are many ways to achieve this, from “breadcrumb” style navigation strings, sitemaps, or simply having a “home” or “back” link on each page.

There are many other things that can influence people decisions to use your site or not, but these are some of the most common website mistakes that could lose you business, and if you rectify these (if they are on your site) then you stand a better chance of obtaining business through your website.

In the article, they compared the homepage of your website to a shop window, a page to entice your potential customers into your site and to buy into whatever your product or service may be. Although the homepage is important, it isn?t the most important page of the site, and nor should it be (in my opinion) the ?main focus? of your website although many from a marketing background will still try and convince you that it should be.

Why do they still try and convince me then?

It goes back to viewing the website as working similar to many traditional forms of marketing, let?s use a magazine for this example, many in marketing view the website as a magazine, with a clearly defined page order, with the home page as your ?front cover?.? In the days before SEO really took off this might have been true, and many in marketing still struggle to realise that with the advent of SEO and the ability to make deep level pages feature well in the search engines, that every page has the potential of being the first page seen by your prospective clients.

So what should I do?

The first thing you should do is forget this idea that your homepage is the most important page of the site, and start looking at your whole website and keep in mind that Google (and other search engines) don?t rank websites, they rank web pages.

Each page of your site should be optimised for targeted phrases that are relevant for you business and to the content of the page. For instance, if one of your main services is cleaning limestone in the London area, then you really need a web page that is targeted for the phrase ?Limestone Cleaning London? and that the content of that page focuses on that service rather than just talking about general stone cleaning.

It is also good to remember that on the whole, your average web visitor is lazy, unless the information they are looking for is right there, on the page in front of them, they will back out of your website and go elsewhere.

All your visitors have gone to Google (or other search engine) with a question they want answered, they will have clicked on your site as they believe that you have the answer for them, so be sure that each page tells your potential clients what you can do for them, and why you can do it better than your competitors.

There are many other reasons that your website may not be working as hard for you as it could be, but I will cover these in other articles on the site, but next time someone with a marketing background tries to convince you that your homepage is the be all and end all of your website, ask them why they think that people will be visiting your home page above and beyond other highly optimised pages of your site.

Let’s take putting an advert in local papers as an example, it is broadcasting your message almost like a machine gun – your fire will include a large number of people, but will “hit” much more than just the few readers that have any interest in your product or service, meaning that ultimately you can end up sitting by the phone for days waiting for a single response.

Luckily for business owners things are changing, these days social media is seen as the “way to go” and is a way of using modern channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter to start a “two-way” conversation with your potential clients. By using these kinds of channels you can easily have a conversation with potential customers enabling you to react to their likes, dislikes and concerns almost straight away.

Another use for these channels is that you can use them to boost your brand awareness, remind your clients who you are (some customers may only buy from you once a year for example and so need reminding that you exist) and even better you can remind people why you are the best person for the job.

Sadly, as with anything that has a benefit, the effective use of social media has a cost, although this is usually in terms of time and effort rather than having a direct financial cost. It is important that if you start using one or more of the social channels available to you, that you keep it up, as nothing will turn your customers, and potential customers, off of your product or service then your social media presence being stale.

It’s tempting for many businesses to think to themselves that they must use all four of the main social channels to reach as many people as possible. But, the reality is that before you sign up for any of them, you need to think about the various platforms and their users while at the same time thinking about your customers/prospects and your business.

Some of the pros and cons of each of the main social media platforms are listed below:-

1) Facebook:

Facebook is fast growing, especially among the younger demographics, the average facebook user is between 20 and 35 years of age. As such, Facebook works well with B2C businesses, but there are exceptions – no-one for instance will think of going to Facebook to buy financial services or specialist rebar machinery, but they will look there for handmade craft items, or possibly for healthy snacks or e-cigs. It works well for “impulse” and highly visually appealing buys rather then things that are seen as “necessity” or “serious”. The whole ethos of Facebook is making things easy to share, be that pictures, video, links or just inspiration – making it a very visually driven platform.

2) Twitter:

Twitter because of its limit of 140 characters per message makes it that much harder to break into for certain businesses; however used correctly it can work well for both B2B and B2C businesses. Most commonly it is used for marketing opportunities, for instance if you are printers who want to advertise to as many businesses as possible you have an offer on your double sided, glossy A5 leaflets, then Twitter is a great way to do that, another example of a business Twitter works well for are businesses in the specialist training sector, someone like Mercia who specialise accountancy training and marketing. These businesses can work especially well as they have a clear product or service to offer that isn’t reliant on its “visual impact” (ie, you are happy to book a training course without seeing a picture of the materials you will be using) and especially if you use some of the established hash tags like #bizitalk which instantly gives you access to potentially thousands of customers who monitor that tag and may be needing the service you offer.

3) LinkedIn:

LinkedIn has been slower to get off the ground as a place to sell physical products, it is viewed by many as more of a place to network, which is great if you are trying to sell a service as most of that sort of sale will come from talking to another person about their needs. Likewise, although there is a growing movement on LinkedIn of “non-professional” users, LinkedIn was originally aimed at the professional community and as such is still heavily weighted to that aspect of business. It is great for people that are IFA’s or SEO and Marketing based, but wouldn’t be so suitable for house builders or crafters as the people that are their potential market aren’t really using that platform to buy that kind of product/service.

4) Google+:

This is one of the younger platforms out there, and again, a bit like facebook, encourages people to share images, links, updates and videos. It has “circles” allowing you to sort those you connect with into groups of interest and allows you to direct the information at the according groups. Again, similar to Facebook, Google+ has its own “like” function, in the form of the +1 tab allowing you to easily recommend who websites to your circles. It is still mainly used for personal interactions, and could potentially work well for the same sort of businesses as Facebook but it may be harder as many have the account simply because they can, without understanding properly how to use it to connect to people outside of their address books.

There are other platforms just starting to emerge for the business public that you may have heard of, one is Pinterest, the other is Instagram again, they are visually based platforms. Pinterest allows you to make “pinboards” of your favourite “pins” , each pin is an image with an explanation. Again, these platforms work best for B2C where there is a high visual impact required to trigger the purchase.

Once you have decided which of these channels would best work for your business, you then need to think about what to post of them. As touched on before, it is vital when you start these campaigns that you make sure you have the time and drive to continue with them, ideally platforms like Facebook and Twitter need almost daily content, and you should certainly not go more than a week without posting as this can cause your “followers” to lose interest and move on to other more active and interesting competitors.

Content that educates, amuses or motivates is the best to attract attention, don’t be afraid to share images, quotes or tips that aren’t at first glance directly related to your business, if all you do is talk about your products, service and offers you are falling into the trap of the old “one way” communication that your followers will get bored of just as quickly as if you weren’t posting at all. I am sure that everyone reading this will have seen various pictures of cute fluffy animals doing all sorts of things with amusing captions on them, they can be a great way to lighten the mood of a page, and engage your followers.

Likewise, don’t be selfish, if you see a company (particularly on Facebook or Twitter) that compliments yours sending out information or offers, repeat them, share or retweet them with your followers, and gradually you will find they will return the favour and help market your business too. If you belong to groups on one of the platforms, and see someone asking for help, if you can assist directly, do so, if you can’t refer them on to your group. The author knows a craft business who belongs to a chat group full of fellow crafters of all sorts, and has gained customers simply by being kind enough to share the requests with their fellow craft group when they have been unable to supply the needed item/information that has been asked for.

If you set up on one of the platforms, and discover that you don’t have time for the upkeep of the campaign, and can’t afford to hire someone to specifically look after it, don’t be afraid to then suspend or delete the account, no account on something like Twitter or Facebook is far better than an account where you can see vast gaps in content. There is nothing stopping you from re-starting the campaign at a later date when you have the time or resources.

It has long been suspected (though never proved) by webmasters that Google may use Click-thru rates (aka CTR) as an indicator of a site’s popularity as one of the many of the many factors they use to decide their search engine rankings. So now you know why it is so important, how can you go about increasing it?

Below are some tips to help you improve your click through rate and pre-sell to your audience to increase the traffic, and hopefully the sales, through your website.

1 Make sure people can find what they are looking for quickly.

Many people make the mistake of focusing all their efforts on the home page of their website and almost ignoring the others ? this is because they think of a website like a book or magazine where the “cover” has to be appealing for people?s interest to be caught. The trouble is, that search engines don?t rank web-sites, they rank web-pages and so could serve up a lower level page if they think it more relevant.

Because of this, you need to think carefully when constructing your website, to ensure that although the site hangs together as a whole, each page will stand alone. You would also do well to remember that people are inherently lazy; this isn?t a slight against your potential customers, but an observation of human nature.

If someone comes through to a site promising “deals on your dream home” , make sure that the page they land on has specifics about the deals, if you are offering a specific product or they will move to another site rather then spend time searching yours for the information.

2 Use the right keyphrases

Your market research will have shown you what phrases your target market is likely to be using to find your product/service so make sure you use them. By placing them in the title of your page it means they will show up in Google searches and catch the eye of your potential customers, so long as your title is under 65 characters in length.

If you the also put them in the description, it will help re-enforce both to Google and your potential customer that they will find what they are looking for. Although keep in mind that Google doesn’t use the description Meta for ranking any longer, it still displays it if it is relevant to the page. This will dramatically increase your click-through ratio (and thereby also increase sales).

Think about it from your potential customer?s point of view, with the way the internet is these days there is almost and overload of information. When they see that your title and description has matched their search term, they think, ‘This website has exactly what I’m looking for’ and they eagerly click on your link.

3 Use emotionally charged words.

Website builders are good at building websites, but not necessarily at selling. One of the first things to remember about selling is, it is an emotional process. Most people buy with their emotions and will then attempt to justify it with reason, particularly if it is a “luxury item”- therefore if you want to sell something to them, you have to appeal to their emotions as well as their logic.

However many websites are clean, logical things, very organized and focus on fact rather then feelings. By changing a few words, you could give yourself the edge ? for example, if talking about a food product, instead of describing it as “Sweet”, try using “mouth-watering” or “delicious”. Which would you be more likely to click on? The link stating “How to start your own Internet businesses” or the one “How to run your business from the luxury of poolside.’ ” potentially both are about running your business online, but one builds an appealing mental image.

4 Calls to action and a sense of urgency.

This is probably where a lot of sites fall down in their descriptions. Sometimes you need to have an edge to your description to get people to click, being what they want isn’t always enough, and you can do this by injecting a sense of urgency. This is easily done by suggesting you have limited stock, or a time sensitive promotion.

While these tips are fairly common sense, you may be surprised by how quickly you can see an improvement in your click-thru rates and hopefully your sales too.

People are naturally wary of anything new, especially if at first glance it looks like it may be too good to be true. This isn’t an bad thing, in-fact this instinct has kept our species alive throughout the millennia – however it doesn’t make selling a product or service very easy! The good news is that people start to relax when others can say to them “well, I tried that and it worked out great for me!” and the more people that say it, the more relaxed they become – this is, simply put, the role of your testimonials as many potential clients may not know someone personally that has used your produce or service.

Testimonials will help to add credibility to your pitch, making your “story” become that much more believable with every testimonial you can produce to show your potential client. It is entirely possible that over time you will get many positive testimonials, and you should be sure that if the testimonials are dated, that you approach your happy customers regularly to ask them to update their testimonial for you as some may be put off if the only praise they can find about you is several years out of date. Don’t worry though, this is one area of your website that you can never have too much of, the more testimonials, the strong the message.

You don’t have to just rely on written testimonials either, you could even ask for video, or audio testimonials to add some variety, but if you go this route, ensure that they are set to “click to play” rather then auto starting on page load. This is for the very important reason that you don’t know where people are accessing your website from, and they may be forced to back out of your site quickly if a noisy video or audio clips starts up and they are at work.

Don’t just put your testimonials on your website – you have earnt the praise, be proud of it, put them on any marketing that you send out, put them anywhere your prospective clients may see them, ?for instance in a “testimonials book” in your reception that potential clients and visitors can browse through, and even add to.

Let’s take a look at a real testimonial from one of our clients – we have blanked out the customer and client details to ensure their privacy although I am sure they wouldn’t mind us sharing with you.

The above testimonial gives a number of benefits:

• The staff were very helpful
• They managed to sort out problems left by previous suppliers
• Established good procedures and practices for their client to follow going forward
• Given their client confidence in their financial position
• Given their client confidence to look at expanding and developing their business.

If you were looking for a good book-keeper , the chances are this testimonial would reassure you that the company concerned had the right skills and attitude to help you get your business back on track and grow, and this testimonial is just one of several such positive yet believable testimonials on their website.

So the next time you think that your testimonials page is simply padding, or that you worry that it would be seen as bragging, remember that people buy from people, and if your previous customers don’t sell your product or service for you, you may find yourself struggling to do so yourself.

It doesn?t matter what business you are in be it book-keeping like the example above, or if you are a lawyer specialising in family law, testimonials can only help your business grow, and for more examples of good uses of testimonials, follow the links on this page to see how other sites use them.

This kind of site is ideal for non computer savvy clients as they require no specialist knowledge for the consumer to use them, the client can type into titled boxes much like typing into a word document or email, and with a savvy designer can be made to look pretty much however the client wants, as well as giving the ability to add various “plug-in’s”to add to the over all usability and appeal of the site – there are important downsides though, these range from the ability to perform effective SEO on the site which will impact the ability to be found in the search engines, right through to the lack of security if it isn’t updated regularly.

It is vital that if you as a client, are looking at getting a CMS site made for you that you establish who is responsible for upgrading the software when the time comes. It is important that this is settled as otherwise it could easily get overlooked, and you have a situation where the client is not aware they need to do the upgrade, or they are assuming that the hosting company is dealing with it, and the hosting company ignore the upgrades assuming that the client will be doing it ?- this can cause real problems not just for the client (who may potentially loose their site to hackers), but the host company as well as it compromises the security of their server by leaving often important security updates uninstalled, which means all clients on that server are also at risk.

All the CMS systems are in simple terms a set of programs that allow the server to read a database to generate the pages that you can see in your browser. But all programmes can have bugs in them as it is nearly impossible to test every single way that the computer may interpret the data it is given. There are people out there who devote their lives to finding and exploiting these bugs, or “back doors” which allow them access into your website (or your hosts server) and allow them to create mischief.

So yes, technically the site may still be working and looking just fine without the upgrade, but there may be a gaping hole in the program that in theory could allow someone to enter into your site behind the scenes and install something to steal your customers credit card details, passwords, etc, or even change the whole look and focus of your site.

In my preparation for this article, I found that there are several videos out there, in easy access that show how to hack out of date wordpress sites in less then 2 minutes using easily obtainable software, and there are blogs that show there are at least 7 ways to gain access to out of date wordpress, but remember, although I am focusing on WordPress, this is just as true for other CMS systems.

All of the potential security issues and lost sales can be easily avoided if you just check what version of your CMS you are running, and ensure that it is the most recent version, if this is something you can’t do yourself, then contact your developer or hosting company and ask them to check on your behalf and do any upgrades that are needed. It may cost you money if you don’t have a maintenance agreement and that the designer/host takes the approach that the upgrades aren’t something that they should do as a matter of course, but on the positive side, it should make your site much more secure and less likely to have issues, and it is worth remembering that just updating the software after a successful hack doesn’t always work as there are often extra programmes called “back-doors” installed by the hacker to allow them back in again later.

While there are several technical things that you can do to speed up your pages this article is aimed at the person that either can’t or doesn’t want to get involved in that level.

So without further ado, the easiest way to speed up your pages are (in no particular order) :-

1. Make sure that images are at a resolution of 72 or 96dpi, computer screens can’t display high resolutions so just because your camera has produced a photo for your website at 300 or 600dpi doesn’t mean that you should use it. Many image editing software packages allow you to change the resolution.
2. Make sure that images on the page are at the size they should be displayed – don’t put an image on the page that is 2,000 x 1,500 pixels in size and then re-size it in the code for the page to 200 x 150 – the visitor has to download the full sized image and then re-size it, so be kind and re-size it for them. I once looked at a site for a client that broke both of the “rules” above using a photo of a product on the home page that was a total of 4Mb in size – by changing the resolution and resizing the image before it was put on the page if brought the image size down to 120Kb (3% of the original size) and speeded up the page dramatically – this had a side effect of people staying on the page rather than giving up and leaving the site.
3. If y0u are writing your own pages using an editor, look at the code that is generated and remove any blank lines and extra spaces in the code. This may only save one or two kb of data but every little helps when speeding up pages.
4. If you have created your page by copying and pasting the content from a word processing package such as Word you need to be aware that often this results in extra unwanted code being pasted in at the same time – removing this can be time consuming but the results are often a good saving in file size.
5. If you are using styles to alter the look of the text, maybe by changing the font size or type face try to put the styles into an external style sheet (.css file). Although this is an extra call to the server by the browser for the first page the next page on your site that uses the same style sheet will not have to load it into the browser thus speeding up the 2nd page)
6. When creating any style sheets use the same rules regarding white space and blank lines as html files (3 above). I have worked on many style sheets where the original creator put 20 or more blank lines between sections – this not only slowed down the loading of the file but also made it more difficult to edit.

So there you are, 6 easy ways to speed up your web page, helping the search engines load the page, making it faster for visitors and also saving you bandwidth when sending the pages to visitors.

“How do you know all this stuff?” someone asked.?“I use the Google search engine all the time and it leads me to places and information that I would not normally have discovered.” she replied.

Many people now place blind faith in the information that they read on the Internet without questioning how much of the information is fact and how much is opinion. I “asked” Google “Who are the Largest 5 Employers in the World” and received a range of different “answers/opinions” to the same question.

The Top 2 results were both from WikiAnswers, one focusing on public company employment , the other including Governments as an employer.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_are_the_five_largest_employers_in_the_world

1 Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), China, 2,300,000

2 Wal-Mart Stores, United States, 1,800,000 employees

3 Indian State Railways, India, 1,400,000

4 National Health Service (NHS), UK, 1,300,000

5 Deutsche Post, Germany, 502,545 employees

Why do you think this helpful information was published ?

• Is it there to educate the masses ?
• Is it there to harvest traffic and generate advertising revenue?
• Is it there to do both?

You decide !

The Google Caffeine update incororpates real-time social media, blogging and Tweet results with an improved Google ranking algorithm. It is believed that the new algorithm places more emphasis on the quality of links rather than the quantity.

Hiperactive have noticed increases and decreases in client visitor traffic over recent months and we are updating clients sites where appropriate to ensure best practice guidelines are followed. Interestingly search terms with greater than four words are being found more frequently.

A search in Google for Financial News returned some curious results with EFinancialNews in first place ahead of the Financial Times, Reuters and Bloomberg whilst the real time results were listed at the bottom of the page down in position 10. When the “pages from the UK” option was selected in Google the real time results disappeared.

You can read Dave’s excellent article in full?here.