Managing your businesses social media channels is a daily, if not hourly, endeavor. You get into the groove of posting regularly, and it makes it easy to forget about the big picture: your overall social media strategy.

If you’re finding it hard to remember the last time you reviewed your overarching social media strategy, it’s probably time to step back and do a social media audit.

In fact, routine audits should be an important element of your social media strategy. Regular audits will help you identify any weak points in your approach, give you more detailed information about your audience, and help you retool your strategy to match current trends. 

We would suggest doing an in-depth audit at least once a year in addition to a monthly or quarterly mini-audit. Doing a monthly check-in will give you a real-time idea of where you’re at with your goals, making it easier to pivot and adapt as you go. 

Set goals for yourself

If you don’t have a set of measurements to grade yourself against, how will you know if your social media has been successful? 

Before you jump into your first social media audit, set some guidelines for what success looks like. There are many third party templates available – like this one from Sprout Social– or you can set your own goals. 

You’ll want to review the following for each profile: 

• Engagement numbers

• Publishing frequency

• Consistency

• Audience demographics

• Referral sources

• Social media budget/ROI

• Channel specific metrics 

Delve into the numbers

Whether you use built in analytics or an outside platform, you’ll want to make sure you’re checking in regularly to gauge the health of your social media channels. Analytics are invaluable in terms of steering your future strategy and ensuring you are tailoring your content to what works best for each platform.

A few basic things to be looking for:

• Are you on the right platforms? There’s little value in investing time into daily Facebook posts if the majority of your audience uses LinkedIn. Even if you’ve already done this in the past, behaviors change, so make sure you’re up-to-date with current trends. Do some digging to find out where your audience actually is and refocus your efforts accordingly. 

• Who is on your page? Thought you were marketing to young women, but most of your traffic is middle aged men? That’s good information to have so you can tailor your strategy accordingly. 

• What content is most popular? What content is really connecting with you audience – and what isn’t? Consider cutting what isn’t connecting – especially if it’s content that’s taking up the bulk of your content creation time. 

• When is your audience online? Built in analytics make it so you no longer have to guess about peak posting times. 

• Don’t forget to track these stats all the way through to your web traffic. When people come over to your site from social media, how long are they staying? Are they happy with the links you’re serving them?

other MAINTENANCE steps

Once you’ve outlined the metrics you’ll use, there’s a few more things we suggest you do:

Need to display more than one link in your Instagram bio? LinkTree is the solution! Check it out here. 

1.    Go back to your bios

If you don’t regularly check in on your social media bios, you’ll probably be surprised how much has changed since you last updated it. Business objectives change, taglines get updated, and advertising campaigns shift focus – and your social media bios should reflect every one of these significant changes.

Your bio should be tailored to each platform, and no matter where it’s displayed your social bios should be short, snappy, and on-brand. You’ll want to make sure you’ve included an overview of your services, your location, and who you work with/for.

A great example of an Instagram bio

Trendy and affordable clothing boutique for professional women of all ages. Charlotte and Greensboro locations open M-F, 7a-5p. #BoutiqueName

Why it’s good: This bio tells you who this boutique is for, where they’re located and when they’re open. Chances are, that info covers most of the questions first time visitors would ask. Hashtags in Instagram bios are live links, making #BoutiqueName is a valuable use of space. 

A bad example of an Instagram bio

Great clothes, great prices. Founded in 2002, open daily. Visit www.URL.com for more. 

Why it’s bad: When you were founded is pretty much irrelevant information. And, this bio isn’t properly tailored for Instagram – that hyperlink should only be listed in the website field, because that’s the only place a URL is clickable.

2. Refresh your imagery

Visual branding evolves over time – and your cover photos should evolve as well. Bonus points if you update them to fit the seasons, your most current advertising campaign, or special events. 

When it comes to cover photo quality, make sure you’re up to date with the latest trends. For example, most major brands have swapped out a high res image in favor of a video cover photo. If you opt to make the switch, you’ll want to make sure your video looks clear and loads quickly. 

3. Scan the web

Do a quick Google search and make sure there aren’t any profiles out there claiming to be you -- or that you don’t have any old profiles of your own lingering around. If there are, you could be losing out on some business-winning followers.  

If you do come across your own old profile, delete it. And if it’s someone else impersonating you, ask them to remove the page - if they don’t, report it.

4. Create new goals

Now that you’ve tracked and measured your goals, how are you going to improve and change them? Once you’ve concluded your social media audit be sure to set new goals that you hope to achieve in the next month, quarter, or year.  

---

Hue & Tone: Social Media Solutions for every business

If you need help refining or maintaining your social media strategy, you’ve made it to the right place! No matter what state your social media plan is in, we can help you get your profiles back on track. We can even do the posting for you! To learn more, get in touch with us.

Having a slick looking website is key. Having quality content is key. Having an SEO strategy is key. Having an enviable UX journey is key. But what use is all of that if you can’t, or aren’t, monitoring your results?

Measuring traffic is a monumental part of running a website - without it, all your efforts are essentially a guessing game. The benefits of meaningfully measuring your traffic are almost endless, but here’s a summary of our top six. It:
 

• Identifies which pages are and aren’t working for you

• Shows you where improvements can be made

• Presents your business’ peaks and troughs

• Allows you to identify trends and patterns

• Provides a benchmark to continually evolve

• Puts tangible data behind future design, journey and content adaptations
  

If you’re new to this data-driven side of things it can be daunting, but it needn’t be. To help you start your web traffic measurement journey, we’ve got four easy-to-use tools to share with you.

1. Google Analytics

Given it’s the leader of the pack, it only seemed natural to start with Google Analytics (GA). GA is a completely free tracking and reporting platform provided by Google, and it’s an absolute beast in the world of web traffic measurement.

So, let’s take a look at some key metrics you need to be getting the most out of:

Sources: Whether it’s email, SEO, PPC, social, referrals or otherwise, with GA, you can keep abreast of exactly which campaigns are driving traffic to your site, and how much of it they’re bringing in. This will help you to understand which campaigns are working, and which ones are falling flat.

Bounce rate: this is the number of people who land on your site and then ‘bounce’ straight back out. With this one, the lower the number the better. The bounce rate is a really good indicator as to how visitors interact with your site.

A high bounce rate could mean that people find the corresponding page difficult to navigate around, that they don’t like what’s on the page, or that the page isn’t what they expected it to be. Conversely, a low bounce rate shows that visitors have engaged with the page, so much so that they’ve gone and had a look elsewhere on your website.

Time on page: this one ties in nicely with what we’ve just been talking about. A high bounce rate and little time spent on page is the worst combo. Why? Because it’s a sign that the visitor is highly disengaged with what they’ve landed on.

On a more optimistic note, long page durations will show you which pages and content types visitors are interested in, which may help steer the direction you take other pages of your site.

Exit pages: quite simply, this’ll show you at what point visitors are abandoning your site. So, why is this so important? Of course, everyone will leave at one point or another, but if there’s a trend emerging that lots of your visitors are leaving on x page before they complete a conversion, it may well be a sign that some form of action needs taking to rectify it.

Such is the size of GA’s traffic tracking capabilities, we could literally go on forever. But hopefully we’ve given you a flavor of how it can steer your overall strategy.

2.  A/B testing

A/B testing lets you change what your traffic sees when it lands on your site - this could be anything from the text on the page to the color of a button.

So, why’s this so great? Because it puts real-life data behind which variations work best, which can subsequently steer your marketing efforts - for the better.

With A/B testing under your belt, you’re no longer sticking your finger in the air and implementing changes based on what you think might work. Instead, you can make informed decisions using a reliable and representative source of data.

One thing worth mentioning is that’s important to be patient and wait until you’ve built up a decent pot of data before coming to any conclusions. As with any type of research, the numbers need to be statistically significant to add value. Not sure what this means? Check out this calculator to help you with the maths. 

3.  Heatmaps

Another method you can use to measure your web traffic is setting up heatmaps: enter Hotjar (they’re big guns in this arena).

Heatmaps are a really handy way to monitor how your traffic interacts with pages on your site, by tallying up numbers for things like clicks, taps and scrolling behavior.

What does this tell you about your traffic? Well, it tells you where on your page visitors are losing interest. It tells you where people are clicking most, which might steer the placement of your page’s assets. It tells you if certain elements on your page are getting lost. And it tells you which part(s) of the page are drawing the most attention.

All of these learnings can form the basis of navigational, design and content decisions.

As with A/B testing, you should wait until you have a meaningful amount of data before interpreting your numbers and coming to conclusions. Heatmaps work by adding a snippet of code onto chosen pages, so if you’re after quick wins, it might be worth starting with sections of your site that you know receive large volumes of traffic.

 

4.  Visitor videos

Last but not least is the use of visitor recording tools. Admittedly, some of the perks overlap with that of a heatmap, but while heatmaps provide valuable numbers, videos let you actually see your visitors in action.

This helps you monitor and measure your traffic by:

• Understanding visitors’ movements

• Seeing how visitors interact on an individual level

• Getting under the skin of why people get stuck in certain sections

• Seeing exactly where visitors abandon you and forming a picture of the ‘why’

• Allowing you to test new designs and journeys and how they impact your user experience.

The end result? Ample learnings to feed into your website strategy. If you’re unsure of where to go for video recording support, tools like UXPin, Inspectlet, Hotjar and Mouseflow do it well.

---

HUE & TONE: YOUR WEB MARKETING EXPERTS 

Know what you need to improve about your website, but not sure how to do it? Need a fresh perspective on your content and design? Give us a call. We're here to help you with all your web and graphic design needs -- big or small.

A business’s ultimate success has grown increasingly reliant on its web presence; particularly its website. According to an April 2017 survey taken by Statista, 40 percent of internet users in the US stated that they purchased items online, several times per month. Retail e-commerce sales worldwide are expected to nearly double between 2016 and 2020. More people than ever are performing research online before journeying to a brick and mortar store to complete a purchase. With so many transactions occurring online, how can you be certain your website is performing up to par?

Most small business owners can at least determine how much traffic their website solicits. But this can be as beneficial as knowing how many people attended a party without actually talking to anyone. There’s so much more information available. So, if you haven’t already, it’s time to get analytical in 2018.

Conversion

This statistic tells you how successfully your website is completing your intended goal. For example, if you’re Pizza Hut and your website’s primary purpose is for a visitor to complete a purchase, then your conversion statistic will indicate the percentage of visitor’s doing just that. Maybe you’re a real estate company, and your conversion goal is to have web users complete a contact form; this statistic will give you those percentages.

Source Report

Again, most people are familiar with Traffic Acquisition Reports, which measure the amount of traffic your website is getting during any given period of time. But remember, we’re after much more; like, how did they find you in the first place? There’s an analytic for that. A Source Report can tell you if someone arrived at your site by way of a search engine like Yahoo, or a referring site like Pinterest which includes links that route users to a pin’s original site or page. It can even determine how many people typed your url directly into the address bar.

Medium Report

There is also a Medium Report which indicates whether the result was the product of organic search or unpaid search, a paid search result, or via a referring website. All of this information could help influence marketing decisions going forward and guide a strategy for capitalizing on the sources and mediums already generating much of your traffic.

Bounce Rates

This statistic can inform several website elements, because it tracks what happens once a visitor enters your online presence. Do users journey to another page within your site or do they leave it all together? If your bounce percentage is high, you can determine where visitors are landing, which may prompt insight into why they’re leaving. Essentially, this analytic provides valuable insight into what visitors like about your site and what they don’t. Moreover, it empowers you to customize and alter your website accordingly.

Pageviews

This statistic is self-explanatory. It measures how many views a specific page receives. If visitors are returning to the same page again and again, hypothetically, you can formulate content that may garner similar interest. It could also point to other contributing factors like design schemes that users prefer. Using this information to formulate a strategic response can ultimately assist in improving your overall conversion rate.

The world wide web will continue to change and grow to meet human demand and businesses must evolve to keep pace. With the new year, usher in a new marketing strategy with the help of web analytics. It will be the best resolution you’ve ever made.

---

web marketing consultants  |  Greensboro, NC

Need help getting your website set up? Want a second set of eyes looking over your analytics? Hue & Tone Creative will take the stress out of marketing your business online. Check out our design portfolio to see clients we've helped in the past, and then give us a call to get your web presence ready for the new year.