By Susan Mernit
In 2010, Kwan Booth and I worked with a non-profit news and media client in the public media space that wanted to improve its strategic use of social media. The goal was to have a more meaningful conversation with its audience around the company’s primary interests, such as sustainability and access to healthy food.
When we explored our client’s Google analytics stats we saw that they had well over 1 million visits per month and their social media accounts, specifically Facebook, Twitter and social sharing site Digg, were in the top 10 for their monthly referral sources.
Only then, when we took a deeper look, we saw something very problematic: Users that came from their social media sites were less engaged than those coming from Google search. The data looked like this:
In other words, community members coming from their Facebook page and Twitter account, users who had chosen to follow this organization, were paying less attention – and were therefore less engaged – than users who came in through a random keyword search on Google.
In contrast, stats from Oakland Local’s Google analytics show social media deliver highly engaged audiences:
What did we tell our client?
“You have to do better,” we said and then suggested how to get there. We advised moving away from automatic tweets that were fed from an RSS feed. We also suggested increasing the amount of @reply and link curation their social media team offered, while being more consistent about responding in a timely fashion.
Our recommendation was to try to increase overall time spent per referral to an average of 1:30 minutes, more consistent with what the average time spent on their site was with someone who came in directly, 1:34 minutes.
We also suggested the organization rethink its social media sharing stack on the homepage by bringing it above the fold. The client also needed to make the social media buttons far more visible and add like or recommend buttons to every story. This would give more on-site visibility to users coming from Facebook and create more viral ways to Tweet stories, etc.
We also suggested they rely more on helpful tools to help them monitor results.
Specifically, we suggested they set up a Hootsuite account to manage multiple Twitter and Facebook pages. This single account could be used by multiple people and would allow for easy tracking of friends, lists, trending topics and conversations. This gives the organization the capability both to schedule posts and also to get a quick view of what’s being said on their topics.
In addition, we suggested they set up a listening dashboard (either iGoogle or Netvibes) to monitor their own websites, newsfeeds, and social media alerts. Like Hootsuite, this dashboard could can be shared by the entire team.
Finally, we suggested they create a custom social segment in Google Analytics to better track Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr links and mentions. This would offer them an easier view of social media influence and allow them to do more with less.