8 Ways to Reduce Your Site’s Bounce Rate

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Mike Dickman

The Small Business Tips Series is supported by Bantam Live, a web-based collaboration workspace with “Social CRM” for small business teams. For more information visit BantamLive.com.

With the explosion of social media sharing and help from smart search engine optimization, many web users are bypassing businesses’ home pages and landing directly on product pages and blog posts. Thus, businesses need to optimize their “first impressions” at all entry points in order to reduce bounce rates.

Bounce and exit rates are often confused, but have different definitions and purposes. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that hit a page and don’t visit any others within the same site. It should be used to measure the effectiveness of landing pages and is connected to SEO and paid advertising campaigns. In some cases, a page may be designed to give the consumer the information they need and nothing else. In this instance, bounce rate may not be a relevant metric.

Exit rate, on the other hand, is the percentage of visitors that leave a site from a given page. It should be used to monitor specific pages in a process, such as a “shipping options” page that appears during the checkout process. A high bounce rate means you are making a bad first impression; a high exit rate means you have a leak in the process.

Web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik says a bounce rate of less than 30% is good, but with 60% or higher, you have a problem.

Bounce rate stats will differ depending on the type of sites and pages you’re measuring. In Google Analytics, there is a benchmarking section that allows you to compare your site’s bounce rate and metrics to other sites based on size and category.

A blog that offers all of its content on one page will have a high bounce rate. Generally speaking, blogs are reported to average an 80% bounce rate, and this paired with other metrics like time on site and number of comments could be more helpful. The best standard is to measure an individual page’s bounce rate over time.

Here are eight ways to lower your site’s bounce rate. Add your own thoughts in the comments below.

Read more . . .

4 Winning Strategies for Social Media Optimization

Posted on October 23, 2010 by Mike Dickman

by Jim Tobin

This article first appeared on MASHABLE.

Jim Tobin is president of Ignite Social Media, a leading social media agency, where he works with clients including Microsoft, Intel, Nike, Nature Made, The Body Shop, Disney and more implementing social media marketing strategies. He is also author of the book Social Media is a Cocktail Party. Follow him on Twitter @jtobin.

Social media optimization (SMO) is the process by which you make your content easily shareable across the social web. Because so many options exist for where people can view your content, the content model for the web has shifted from, “We have to drive as much traffic to our website as possible,” to the more pragmatic, “We have to ensure as many people see our content as possible.”

You’ll still want most people to see your content on your site — and if you’re doing it right they will — but helping people view content through widgets, apps and other social media entry points will accrue positive benefits for your brand. The more transportable you can make your content, the better.

If you’re ready to get started with a social media optimization plan for your organization, read on for an overview.

Why Social Media Optimization Matters

Before we get to the practical, let’s start with the “Why,” as in “Why you should care about SMO?” As you can see from the chart below, social networks are driving an increasing amount of traffic to an increasing number of websites. Sites like Comedy Central, Forever 21 and Etsy are seeing more traffic from social networks than they see from Google . How social referral traffic is performing for you most likely depends on two factors:

1. How interesting your content is; and

2. How easily shareable you have made that content across a variety of networks.

Image credit: Gigya

In other words, SMO can lead to increased traffic to your site, as friends encourage their friends to digest specific content. If you can appeal to a given person, their friends are statistically more likely to be interested in the same thing, so you’re likely reaching a well-targeted audience. Further, it also leads to improved search engine optimization, as major search engines count links as if they were votes for your site.

SMO isn’t just about building a bigger social media presence for your brand. Whether or not your organization has a strong social network presence, the social networks of others can be leveraged to great effect.

Read more . . .

Why Facebook is Like High School

Posted on October 22, 2010 by Mike Dickman

by Thomas E. Weber

This article first appeared on The Daily Beast.

How does the social media giant decide who and what to put in your feed? Cracking the Facebook Code.

The more digital our daily lives become, the more perplexing the questions seem. Will the growth of social media destroy our notions of privacy? Is democracy helped or harmed by the cacophony of opinions online? And perhaps most confounding: Why does that guy I barely know from the 10th grade keep showing up in my Facebook feed?

If you’ve ever spent time on Facebook, you’ve probably pondered that last one. The social-networking giant promises to keep us connected with our friends in exchange for pumping a steady diet of advertising at us—but the algorithms Facebook uses to decide what news to pass along can seem capricious or altogether impenetrable.

The Daily Beast’s one-month experiment into Facebook’s news feed yielded the following discoveries:

A bias against newcomers
“Most Recent” doesn’t tell the whole story.
Links are favored over status updates, and photos and videos trump links.
“Stalking” your friends won’t get you noticed.
Raise your visibility by getting people to comment.
It’s hard to get the attention of “popular kids.”

Facebook, much like Google with its search algorithms, consistently refuses to go into details about how it picks and pans content (save a few glancing details this year about the enigmatic engine that powers it, EdgeRank). So, with the mystery of that 10th-grade friend in mind, The Daily Beast set out to crack the code of Facebook’s personalized news feed. Why do some friends seem to pop up constantly, while others are seldom seen? How much do the clicks of other friends in your network affect what you’re shown? Does Facebook reward some activities with undue exposure? And can you “stalk” your way into a friend’s news feed by obsessively viewing their page and photos?

To get the answers, we devised an experiment, creating our own virtual test lab within the confines of Facebook and tracking thousands of news-feed items over a period of several weeks. The focal point of our experiment: Phil Simonetti, a 60-year-old Facebook newcomer who allowed us to dictate and monitor his every move.

Like a half-billion people before him, Simonetti joined Facebook and began typing in his status updates. But in this case, Simonetti’s only friends were a hand-picked roster of more than two dozen volunteers who agreed to sift through their news feeds for the duration of our experiment, dutifully recording any Phil sightings.

As our volunteers checked in with their reports, some remarkable findings began to emerge:

1. Facebook’s Bias Against Newcomers. If there’s one thing our experiment made all too clear, it’s that following 500 million people into a party means that a lot of the beer and pretzels are already long gone. Poor Phil spent his first week shouting his updates, posted several times a day, yet most of his ready-made “friends” never noticed a peep on their news feeds. His invisibility was especially acute among those with lengthy, well-established lists of friends. Phil’s perpetual conversation with the ether only stopped when we instructed our volunteers to interact with him. A dynamic which leads to…

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5 Big Social Media Questions from Small Business Owners

Posted on October 18, 2010 by Mike Dickman

by Erica Swallow

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum.

There are a lot of buzz words on the social web these days: group buying, location-based services, SEO, just to name a few. Sorting through the information to figure out what’s just hype and what your business can actually work with can be a daunting task — it uses up resources, including time and money, and sometimes leads you and your social media strategy in the wrong direction.

With technology adoption rates skyrocketing among small businesses and small business social media success stories popping up all around the web, it’s likely that more SMBs will be joining the social revolution in the near future.

But how does your business decide which social venues are right for your company, customer base and goals? It’s a tough call, but it all boils down to doing your research and creating a clear-cut strategy.

While serving on a panel at a recent social media training session for small business owners, I received a number of questions on how to grow a business using social media and other free or low-cost tools on the web.

Five particular questions stood out as being highly relevant and oh-so fresh, so I would like to share them with the greater community of small business owners looking to promote their companies via social media. Add your own thoughts and questions on these topics in the comments below.

1. Is group buying right for my business?

Read more . . .

HOW TO: Customize Your Background for the New Twitter

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Mike Dickman

by Christina Warren

This article first appeared on MASHABLE.

The Better Profiles Series is supported by Gillette. Learn more about Gillette and its products at Gillette.com.

Last month, Twitter unveiled a total site redesign. The new Twitter homepage is robust, more like a stand-alone application, and offers support for multimedia, keyboard shortcuts, and easy access to various types of content.

The new design also has different dimensions (originally based on the golden ratio) and treats backgrounds in a slightly different way. The result is that a carefully customized Twitter background that looked fantastic on the old Twitter, may not work so well with the new design. In many cases, the best solution is to create a new color scheme or background design to fit into the new parameters.

As more and more users are gaining access to the new Twitter, we thought it would be a good time to revisit the area of Twitter customizations. Fortunately, Twitter now offers some fantastic theming tools to make the process less of a chore, and we’ve created some Photoshop (PSD) files mapped to the dimensions of the new Twitter to help give you a head start.

Plan Your Layout

The new Twitter utilizes a fluid layout, meaning that the browser window or screen resolution can impact the width of some of the columns, as well as how much of the background image is visible.

Check out this image that we created to show off the layout of the new Twitter. Although resized to fit this blog post, this screenshot was originally taken at a resolution of about 1440 pixels wide.

Read more . . .

Forget Community. Forget Conversation. Business Blogging Is About SEO.

Posted on October 1, 2010 by Mike Dickman

By Rick Burnes

This article originally appeared on HubSpot.

If you don’t blog, you’re probably tired of people telling you why you should.The blog-pushers who insist it’s a great way to create a community around your product.

The evangelists who argue blogging is a great way to create conversation.

The practical folks who tell you blogging is a better way to publish your press releases.

You don’t dispute any of this. You just find it wishy-washy.

Your business is a data-driven machine. You live and die by leads and sales. You don’t have time for unmeasurable, time-consuming concepts like community and conversation.

Fine.

Forget community. Forget conversation. There’s a far simpler, far more measurable reason to blog: search engine rankings.

If you publish a regularly updated, well-written blog on your company’s site, it will show up more often in search engine results.

Most marketers miss this. They focus on the sexier social, networking and thought-leadership aspects of blogging. These are all very important reasons to blog (you can’t really forget community and conversation), but they’re complicated to measure.

Great search engine ranking is easier to measure. Just consider how much you’d have to pay to get equivalent ranking on a pay-per-click basis.

If you write a post about your fantastic windmill consulting firm and it shows up in the search results for “new windmills” your blog will get lots of new traffic and leads that you’d otherwise have to pay to for.

This blog is another great example. It drives three times as much traffic from Google to HubSpot as HubSpot’s traditional company site. To purchase the same kind of traffic (and the leads that come with it) we’d have to pay Google millions.

Think about that — our blog is giving us millions of dollars worth of free advertising and generating leads we can count.

There’s nothing wishy-washy about that.

DEAD OR ALIVE: The World Wide Web

Posted on September 11, 2010 by Mike Dickman

by Mike Dickman

Is the Web Dead?

I just finished reading an article in WIRED magazine which really got me thinking: Is The Web Dead? To get a better understanding of this position, think about how you use the Internet each day. You get up in the morning, log in to Facebook, check your wall, check Twitter and see if you have any more followers, and log into Pandora so you can stream your favorite music all day at work. You’ve been all over the Internet, but you have yet to hit the Web.

Today’s Internet visitors are spending most of their time on Apps such as Facebook or Twitter. Facebook has now even surpassed Google in the amount of visits and duration of visits. YouTube is the largest search engine on the Internet and you’re reading this article on a Blog, on the Internet and off the Web.

With the growth of social sites, the Web is losing steam and lots of traffic. And, with the likes of Starbucks and Coca Cola gaining more than 90,000 new Facebook Fans PER DAY, it would seem inevitable that the reign of the Web, could be dead.

The Web is just one of many applications that exist on the Internet, which uses IP and TCP protocols to move packets around. The revolution is the architecture, not the specific applications, which is built on top of it. Today, the content you see in your browser (largely HTML data delivered via the HTTP protocol on port 80) accounts for less than 25% of the traffic on the Internet – and that is shrinking. The applications that account for more of the Internet’s traffic include peer-to-peer file transfers, email, corporate VPNs, the machine-to-machine communications of APIs, Skype calls, online games – including Xbox Live, iTunes, VOIP phones, Netflix movie streaming and more.

In April, I re-posting an article released by Morgan Stanley which stated that the number of users accessing the Internet from mobile devices will soon surpass the number of those accessing from PCs. This will only accelerate the rate at which the Web is left behind as more applications, which will make web browsing from a mobile device easier, are accessed by these users. For the sake of an optimized “web” experience, users will forgo their general purpose browsers.

So, as the Internet moves from our desks to our pockets and our view history confirms that we are an application minded social society, where do you see the Web is headed and do you believe THE WEB IS DEAD?

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Why Social Media Optimization Matters

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by Thomas E. Weber

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1. Is group buying right for my business?

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The Integration Question

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Plan Your Layout

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