By Ian Cleary, {grow} Contributing Columnist
Part of my daily routine is going to the gym. The gym is a chance for me to think about what I’ve delivered that morning, plan out my day and dream about potential ideas for my business.
In the world of social media it’s important to step back and review what you have done and implement changes on a regular basis. And maybe, just maybe, it’s time for a social media makeover. Here are five cool tools you can use that just might deliver some new “oomph” to your social media efforts:
1. Ignite Facebook Fans
On average only 16 percent of your fans see your Facebook updates. Suck! This is a well-known number but something you should completely ignore because there’s no reason why you should be average!
But even if 50 percent of your fans see your Facebook updates there’s still the other 50 percent that don’t see them at all. And on top of this are they actually reading them? How often do you read all the updates on your Facebook page?
One strategy for ensuring more of your fans see your updates is converting your fans to eMail Subscribers. This means you can communicate with them over both channels and have a better chance of reaching them.
You can add a customized application to your Facebook page with a provider such as Heyo, Tabsite or a run a competition using Shortstack and start building those email subscribers.
2. Measure Conversion from Social Media Traffic
Social media is not necessarily all about sales but I’m sure you’d like to see some action from the updates you make. This may be visits to your website where you get people spending time there, subscribing to your email list or buying your products or services.
If you set up goals within Google Analytics, Google will start tracking social media activity for these goals. If you go to the traffic sources section of Google Analytics, select all traffic and then select the relevant goal you can view the conversion rate across any channel.
The goal set up in this report is related to getting email subscribers. From the image above you see that there is a 2.50% conversion rates from LinkedIn and 1.90% from Facebook. This gives you a goal to achieve higher on both channels.
If you don’t have goals set up in Google Analytics or an equivalent analytics program, then consider doing so as soon as possible!
3. Easily Optimize Your Content for Google
If you have a well-established blog with a large amount of traffic, you may not be too concerned about optimizing your content for Google. But if you want to get additional traffic and you want to ensure that it is relevant, then it’s important to help Google index your content correctly.
When writing blog posts there is a very useful free plugin called WordPress SEO which gives some guidelines that you can follow to optimize the content.
Using this plugin you specify the focus keywords you want Google to rank you on and then it then gives an indicator where these keywords are mentioned in the post in areas that are relevant for Google.
If you don’t have WordPress you can still identify focus keywords and make sure they are included in relevant areas as indicated in the image above.
4. Capture the Attention of your Website Visitors
What are you doing to capture the attention of your visitors when they come to your website?
Do you use popup’s, clear calls to action, a bar that appear across the top of the screen?
By getting your visitors attention you can get them to take action. Lead Converter is a useful tool for capturing attention. You can test out a banner that appears across the top of the screen, popup’s, boxes that slide out at the bottom the page and more.
If you had a free guide you could show a banner across the top of your screen after a visitor is on the page for a certain time. This captures the visitor’s attention like this:
The conversion chart will show what conversion you get from this and in this example it’s 2.11 percent. A conversion in this case is someone that clicks the “Yes, please” button and signs up as an e-mail subscriber.
2.11 percent is OK but not what I want so more testing is required. Think about how you can attract attention of visitors on your website to achieve your goals.
5. Start Using Slideshare
Slideshare was initially developed as a tool for sharing presentations but has since expanded out to videos, documents and much more. When you create your blog post it’s useful to consider where else you could promote this post. By changing your blog post into a presentation you could share it on Slideshare. This is very much a B2B platform so if you are targeting the business community Slideshare is ideal.
When you share out a presentation on Slideshare it’s indexed almost immediately so straight away you can start getting visitors. Just make sure you consider what your ‘focus keywords’ are when sharing out content to help Google index it correctly.
If you are interested in Slideshare a good starting point is Todd Wheatland’s book on SlideShare.
These are just five improvements you could make today for an almost instant social media makeover. Let us know your thoughts and please share any improvements that you would suggest.
Ian Cleary is founder of Razorsocial, a website that provides sharp insight on on social media management tools. Follow Ian on twitter @iancleary
