Why Social Media Analytics are so important

Social Media analytics is paramount to any business with an online presence to track whether the content you create and publish works or not. Targeting your primary audience with your social media content should be the primary goal of your content brainstorming and creation. Utilising analytics will allow you to:

The power of analytics should not be underestimated. These insights can help you adjust your social media strategy and help drive future content decisions. They can help you improve product development, the customer’s experience and branding.

When improving your social media strategy, you should only change one thing and give that time to see accurate results within your analytics.

Tips for a better website

Do you want to update your website but don’t know where to start?  Here are a few tips to get you started.

Ensure that you have a call to action on every page. This means the visitor does not need to go searching for that free ebook or video about your product or service as the button is right there.

Put your phone number on the home page so that people can instantly see how they can contact you.  You will be surprised how many websites do not include this information.

Add an About Us page so that people can learn more about you.  People buy from people they know, so by adding this page, they feel like they have gotten to know you better.

Make your website mobile-friendly as nearly 50% of your traffic is likely to be from a mobile phone and a website that is hard to navigate on a mobile may be losing you new business.

Why it is Important to Optimise Your Website for Mobile

If your website is not getting the attention you would like it to, you are probably wondering how you can improve it. There are many, many areas of a website that you can ‘optimise’ to try and increase traffic, clicks etc but one very important aspect is ensuring that it is optimised for mobile use. It simply isn’t enough to have your website optimised for laptops or desktops in this age.

People generally spend an inordinate amount of time on smaller, mobile devices so, it is imperative that they can easily access and use your website on those devices. If people cannot easily navigate your site via a mobile device, they will go somewhere else. Its as simple as that. In most cases, more than half of website traffic will be from a mobile device.

If you are wondering how mobile-friendly your site is, Google offer a Mobile-Friendly Test so you can try it out and see how it works, or just access your site on your mobile device and see what the user experience is like. Do not underestimate the importance of the mobile-friendliness of your site.

Tips to Writing Good Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

As many may know, when you are trying to improve your SEO, you need to be sure to write good title tags and meta descriptions for your website and content. However, it may not be clear what aspects of the writing actually make the title or description ‘good’. Here are a few tips to ensure that you are going about things the right way to help your search engine ranking.

• Consider Length- you do not want the either the title or description to be too long or too short. Title tags are recommended to be around 50-60 characters, whereas the meta description should around 155 characters but optimised for the first 110-130 characters.

• Include keywords without going overboard.

• Always have different titles and descriptions for content. Duplication is bad.

• The title tag should have the most important words.

• Write it like an ad that will entice the user to click on that item.

• Be sure to include brand name in the title tag.

All of these tips will help improve your title tag and meta description writing to help optimise your chances on search engines.

What is an Instagram Grid?

Have you ever looked through someone’s Instagram photos and noticed a beautiful pattern? What some businesses or Instagram users are doing now are planning out their image posts so that when you look at their Instagram ‘photo grid’ you see alternating types of photos to create a unique pattern, typically a 3×3 pattern.

This can be a great way to really capture Insta users’ attention and get them checking out your content. It can really help give your business Instagram page a leg up so that you stand out against competitors.

To get started you need to come up with a plan and it has to work in groups of three, as that is the way the Instagram grid is set up, rows of three. You could do this simply by alternating light and dark pictures or posts, or alternating text and photo images. If you create content templates for yourself, it will aid the planning process.

It will take time to see the results but, as long as you strictly stick to the plan, over time you can create a beautiful feed so that when people check out your Insta profile they can see how organised and professional your picture grid looks.

The Top Five Things Users Want from a Website

Having a user-friendly website not only benefits your customers, it also benefits you. With technological developments, people’s attention spans continue to decrease. If potential customers cannot find what they need and quickly they will leave rather than faff with a long or difficult process. Here are five top tips to retaining users and turning them into customers.

1. Have a great Landing Page. When people click on your website or are lead there via a link, the first thing they see needs to be appealing.

2. The site needs to be easy to use. Having a comprehensive menu and search bar that helps the user find exactly what they need can make a huge difference. People of all technological abilities need to find it simple to use. Try having friends and family use your website to help identify any issues.

3. High performance is important. The longer it takes pages to load, the more likely people are to lose interest and leave. Also, if it takes more than 3-4 steps to get to any one point, try to find a way to reduce the steps.

4. Ensure your website is integrated with other platforms that you are on. People want to be able to see from your website, if you are on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn etc. Having all of your platforms integrated and portraying the same brand and tone will build trust.

5. Ensure your website is adaptable. It is very important for the content on your website to scale appropriately for use on mobile devices so that the pictures fully visible and text is easily legible. If it is difficult to go through your website on a phone, users may just go somewhere else that is mobile friendly.

Will an image post or video post receive a better reach on Social Media?

Social media is one of the most powerful tools you can use for every business but understanding the algorithms of social media is a bit of a minefield for most. Posting on your social media platforms is one of the most important things you can do for your online presence and is a task that you should carry out daily.

Deciding what type of content to post can be tricky, but posting unique, eye-catching, and creative content is a sure way to increase engagement on your posts. Compared to text-only posts video and images posts perform far better statistically and you should avoid plain text posts if you can.

The algorithm on most social media platforms is likely to push out an image or a video post to more users than a plain text one but more specifically, research suggests that a video or a live stream video is likely to be shown to more users.

What is SEO?

SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimisation which is the practice of increasing quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. To understand SEO, you will need to consider the quality and quantity of traffic.

1. Quantity of traffic – this is how many people are clicking through to your website

2. Quality of traffic – this is your target audience. You need to make sure your SEO is bringing you the correct people to your website.

How does it work?

All popular search engines such as Google have a primary search results list, these results are based on what that search engine considers most relevant to users. Each search engine you’re using has a crawler that gathers information on content they can find on the Internet. Using this information an index is built and fed through an algorithm that tried to match all the data with your query.

Should you be investing your time on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn has over 250 million active users but seems to rank behind Facebook and Instagram in terms of time business owners invest using this platform. LinkedIn is a slightly different platform to the others and is a completely professional platform rather than a social one.

LinkedIn is an ideal platform for every business owner and is becoming a place where lots of people check out profiles before using a business. You can have a business page set up with your personal profile connected to it.

There are a lot of high-profile users on LinkedIn in senior positions – these are the type of people who actually make big decisions in big companies. Connecting with them can be a great advertising tool that could help land big contracts.

LinkedIn articles are a great tool for your businesses and will keep you up to date with changes in your industry and industry news. This also means that you can publish interesting articles which in turn will build up engagement and establish valuable connections.

Top 3 Facebook live video tips

Videos on Facebook tend to perform far better than text or photo posts so it’s a no brainer than you should be doing Facebook live videos. People love to see the face of the brand so they are a great way to build up interaction with current and potential customers. We’ve picked out our top 3 best tips to help you perform better with your live videos.

1. Source the content from your following – by allowing your following to pick the type of live they want from you; you have already started engaging and got your following excited to see the topic they have chosen.

2. Let your following know in advance – many users jump on a do a live video without any prior warning to their followers and wonder why it was a flop. You need to give your following a heads up so they can be there to watch.

3. Be prepared – limit distractions – this one really does go without saying but even the smallest disruption can throw you off track. Something as simple as alerting other members of your household not to interrupt at a certain time can eliminate distractions and keep you focused.