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Measuring Your Blog Enterprise Using Social Media Statistics and Google Analytics

Marketers who take the time to measure the reach and quality of their content can better focus on their own continuous improvement. Others cannot.

As part of the Humber college MRKT 251 course, students will learn how to use metrics to monitor and measure their blog's growth in the marketplace, and will learn how to use and interpret the data to better focus their marketing activities on the Internet.

How Do We Measure Our Success?  Many paid and free tools exist for marketers today. We will be using the following free tools to make a weekly social media dashboard that will be handed in as part of your weekly portfolio assignment.

1. Native Stats on Blogger Are Too Primitive for College Kids 

Students can check their stats using the option found in their Blogger CMS (Content Management System)  or 'dashboard', but these are pretty limited. This very basic statistical report option doesn't let users check specific date ranges, or traffic sources.  So if this is all the feedback that users get, then they are pretty much blogging blindly in that good night.

2.  Google Analytics is the First and Best Analytics Tools for Modern Marketers

With customizable date ranges and segmented sessions, tracking code implementations and easy-to-focus filters and other diverse functionality options, the Google Analytics dashboard is still 'the standard' in modern web marketing.

Here are the latest numbers for my Humberproof blog on Google Analytics, and it shows some very interesting numbers. The big spikes happen on Monday nights and the days when I update my blog. There will be another big spike today and tomorrow no doubt as I publish this piece.  But you can see the blog has only ever had 33 readers- the students, and my Mom, and maybe a few of the student's Moms. It also has a bounce rate of 77% OMG that's very close to the 80% cut off that we suspect Google doesn't like. That mead that 7.7 out of every ten people who visit my blog leave within eight seconds without clicking anything ! OMG

Students check their bounce rates, and wonder about their traffic sources. What causes their spikes? and how can they minimize the trough between the spikes (maybe with programmed tweets ? etc)

3. Twitter Analytics shows Twitter Stats with a truly Insightful Display

 One of my favourite statistical measurement tools because of all the juicy insights it provides, Twitter's own analytics program is excellent. Simply navigate to http://analytics.twitter.com 

In addition to measuring your own data, marketers and advertising agencies can request bloggers and social media personalities send them screen grabs of their  Twitter Analytics dashboards as proof of their own competencies. Will any agency or media broker buy tweets from a blogger who can't get 10K impressions in 28 days?   Haa perhaps if I had tweeted more often.

And the sidebar insights show quality and appreciation factors.

Engagement Rate is a most telling factor as this data answers the question, 'Are you just broadcasting mindlessly to the masses?' and 'Is anyone listening and acting on your messages?'
Obviously this is key component to grading 'influence peddlers'.

Link Clicks is my favourite metric and should be considered  'real engagement' as that's real people leaving Twitter to go somewhere or see something the marketer created. I'm thrilled to think that 58 people saw my media over the course of the last 28 days.

Retweets is important tests of trust and importance. For example, if I was hiring a twitter personality and he or she got no retweets then I would wonder about their standing in their communities and whether or not they are good representatives for my brand?

Favourites is a way to gauge how well a Twitter person can compose their tweet and their use of rich media and other elements.  This is a really great way to determine if the marketer or 'influencer' in other ways, ie photographer or composer or reporter or celebrity for some other reason.

One metric that I do believe is missing is # of tweets a user does per day, and a volume per action calculator - it should be called the Wind Factor. I believe I would score very high, or rather very low on such a scale as I only tweet once or twice a day.

4. TweetReach is Great Way to Measure a Twitter #Hastag Over a Campaign

Whenever I start a cool web marketing campaign, I always set a unique twitter hashtag that I can measure later using TweetReach.com. It has to be unique so that I can measure it alone - what I mean is that if I try to measure the spread of #Humber or #SEO, it will be impoosible to separate out my messages from the deluge that already exists under those hashtags.

Here is something I have just started called Cloud Warriors - the event is next Tuesday 24th Feb,

As you can see we're off to a promising start. I will show this same campaign next Monday night in class, and we should see a pronounced growth in the volume and distribution of this messaging, and hopefully a greater diversity of tweeters too.

5. BUFFER offers many Different Perspectives on Social Analytics

 Bufferapp; https://bufferapp.com/ is really good for combining four different social media platforms

Buffer is terrific for combining four or five different platforms for 1) ease of publishing and 2) efficient

6.   Facebook Insights

Navigate to https://www.facebook.com/ and search insights  (no additional registration is required for FB Insights).

They are visible once you have 30 LIKES on your FB Page.

7. ANY OTHER STATS  

Instagram , Flickr, Google+ , Imgur, and discussion forum threads.

Sometimes to add colour to reports I go and find popular threads on discussion forums that I have started, like this example for #CloudWarriors that was launched four days ago.

Final Notes 
Students can get a snipping tool or use to make instant screen grab pictures,
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-snipping-tool-capture-screen-shots#1TC=windows-7
The social media dashboards will be made by using the Snipping tool to cut and copy the images.

These images will then be pasted into a PPT slide which makes it easy to move and resize the images. An example of a social media dashboard is shown in a separate handout for this week Please follow the directions outlined below and register to use these elements: In addition, snip the results and save them to a single PPT slide to make your social media dashboards.

There will be a full account of what's expected in the presentation and portfolio submissions in our next class

Better Blogging, the Secret of the Sidebar

In my third Humberproof post, I'd like to elaborate on how flushing out your blog sidebar can add an entirely new dimension to your content portal.

In this 120 year old movie, The Sprinkler Sprinkled by Louis Lumiere (1895), a man steps on a garden hose and gets off when the Gardiner is peering into the nozzle. The next time it happens the prankster is off screen, and this leaves the audience pondering what's happening out of frame. And that, essentially, is the secret of the blog sidebar. The widgets in the margin show readers what's outside the story.

The secret of the sidebar is simply that you can use these content bytes to amplify readership around your content, and... The sidebar can create story loops, by which I mean you can use other media to funnel readers to and from your story bits all over the web. This can be a powerful branding exercise for readers.

In some ways the big social media networking websites are the human power stations of the internet, and your channel is a power line you can plug directly into your blog. Widgets are the energy sockets, and whenever you can import feeds directly into your blog through sidebar widgets you can amplify your readership.

For most business websites, the blog sidebar is the perfect place to showcase the firm's social media personalities. With Facebook,Twitter, Instgram, LinkedIN and YouTube sidebar feeds displayed in widgets, even a boring financial blog or tired sales blog can come alive with author's personalities and hook new readers who find and follow their channels back to the hub. 

How I put a Flickr Badge in my sidebar?

I navigated over to  http://www.flickrbadge.com/ and tweaked it until I got it just right. I deliberately choose a 300x sidebar so that I could accommodate wider and more compelling widgets. With Flickr, every picture is a story, and I use the description sections of each picture to link to other parts of the same story elsewhere on the web.  

Social Media Channels Add Context in Blog Sidebars

Any company that wants to be perceived as being innovative and competitive today has to have smart social media telling the world how innovative and competitive they are.. And it works best if they can do that without their 'followers' realizing they're being influenced.

Having a strong social presence can also help the website's SEO provided the authors are promoting interesting content and not simple blasting out the main website's sales pages. 

Professor Rob asks "Is your company’s social media diet all pop and chips, or steak and kidney pie?

I found an Instagram widget by searching for 'instagram blog widget' on Google where I found Websta, http://websta.me/tools which let me customize the dandy little widget you can see in my sidebar. My content is not very good on Instagram because I'm not very skilled with my phone.

I added a twitter widget and this serves as yet another reminder for me to tweet more often.

You should Make a Custom Favicon 

I also made a favicon for this blog, but I don't see it yet.. Do you see it? It should be in the top left corner of the address bar.  I used my face, but I might change it to big squishy H for Humberproof.

I used this exact picture you can see here to the left. The photo is exactly square and under 100kbs, which are the only parameters. To accomplish that I navigated to this free image cropping and image squaring service,
http://www.webresizer.com/resizer/

And frankly I'm a little surprised that Blogger doesn't make it easier to crop and shape squares this in the CMS.

In class on Monday night I will add a Pinterest widget to the sidebar.